What is Graphic Design? | Interaction Design Foundation
What is Graphic Design?
Graphic design is the craft of creating visual content to communicate messages. Applying visual hierarchy and page layout techniques, graphic designers use typography and pictures to meet users’ specific needs and focus on the logic of displaying elements in interactive designs to optimize the user experience.
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Graphic Design – Molding Users’ Experience Visually
Graphic design is an ancient craft, dating back past Egyptian hieroglyphs to 17,000-year-old cave paintings. As a term originating in the 1920s’ print industry and covering a range of activities including logo creation, it concerns aesthetic appeal and marketing – attracting viewers using images, color and typography. However, graphic designers working in user experience (UX) design must justify stylistic choices regarding, say, image locations and font with a human-centered approach, focusing on—and seeking maximum empathy with—users while creating good-looking designs that maximize usability. Aesthetics must serve a purpose – in UX design we don’t create art for art’s sake. So, when doing graphic design for UX, you should consider the information architecture of your interactive designs, to ensure accessibility for users, and leverage graphic design skills in creating output that considers the entire user experience, including users’ visual processing abilities. For instance, if an otherwise pleasing mobile app can’t offer users what they need in several thumb-clicks, its designers will have failed to marry graphic design to user experience. The scope of graphic design in UX covers creating beautiful designs that users find highly pleasurable, meaningful, and usable.
“Design is a solution to a problem. Art is a question to a problem.”
Graphic Design is Emotional Design
Although the digital age entails designing with interactive software, graphic design still revolves around age-old principles. Striking the right chord with users from the first glance is crucial. As a graphic designer, you should have a firm understanding of color theory and how vital the right choice of color scheme is. Color choices must reflect not only the organization (e.g., blue suits banking) but also users’ expectations (e.g., red for alerts; green for notifications to proceed). You should design with an eye for how elements match the tone (e.g., sans-serif fonts for excitement/happiness) and overall effect, noting how you shape users’ emotions as you guide them from, say, a landing page to a call to action. Often, graphic designers are involved in motion design for smaller screens, carefully monitoring how the work’s aesthetics match users’ expectations and enhance usability in a flowing, seamless experience by anticipating their needs and mindsets. With user psychology in mind some especially weighty graphic design considerations are:
- Symmetry and Balance (including symmetry types)
- Flow
- Repetition
- Pattern
- The Golden Ratio (i.e., proportions of 1:1.618)
- The Rule of Thirds (i.e., how users’ eyes recognize good layout)
- Typography (encompassing everything from font choice to heading weight)
- Audience Culture (re Color Use and Reading Pattern)
How to Change Your Career from Graphic Design to UX Design
If there’s an occupation that is 100% linked with the public’s idea of what design is all about, it’s graphic design. From the familiar golden arches of the McDonald’s brand to the typography and colors of movie posters, graphic designers create some of the most iconic and ubiquitous designs around us. So why would a graphic designer like you want to change your career to UX design? Well, for one, much can be said about the sense of satisfaction and fulfillment derived from getting “under the hood” of the products you work on rather than working on the exterior. Furthermore, according to PayScale, the average salary for a graphic designer in the United States is $41,000(1), but the same for a UX designer is a whopping $74,000(2).Whatever the reason for the move, it’s clear that it can be a very rewarding one. But how do you go about switching from graphic design to UX design? Let’s find out.
The user experience (UX) is what a user of a particular product experiences when using that product. A UX designer’s job is thus to create a product that provides the best possible user experience. How does that happen?
What is User Experience and User Experience Design?
Well, it starts with a lot of research. You can’t create anything of value to a user unless you understand what kind of problems they want to solve and how you can solve those problems, so that the user will want—or better still, need—your solution. You can only get that understanding by interacting with users.
UX designers tend to be concerned with, as you can see from the image below, 3 primary factors: the look of a product, the feel of that product and the usability of that product.
Emotional Design
Graphic design is about emotional communication through typography, color and images; serif fonts and dark, duller colors evoke seriousness, while san-serif fonts and bright colors tend to bring out a sense of joy or excitement. Graphic designers are hence very often emotional designers who elicit specific reactions in a user. UX design is also concerned with shaping the emotions of the user, although it tends to take a broader, big picture view of the entire user’s experience with the product. On top of focusing on the right typography and colors, UX designers are also concerned with motion design, the tone of the content, and information architecture, among others.
Creative thinking
Graphic designers and UX designers are both equally skilled at creative thinking. For graphic designers, creating visuals that adhere to conventions (and thus communicate effectively) while retaining a sense of originality (to stand out among the competition) requires some serious creative and critical thinking. In the same way, UX designers have to create products that solve users’ problems—and sometimes, conventional solutions aren’t always the best or most appropriate ones.
Prototyping
Graphic designers often create mockups and wireframes of their designs prior to delivering a finished design. It gives a chance for clients to offer feedback on their designs and for them to improve them without having to start from scratch. UX designers create mockups and prototypes too, but these tend to be less focused on the “look” of the product and more on the “feel” of it. Is the prototype useful? Is it usable? Is it desirable? These are the questions a UX designer wants answers to.
The Differences between Graphic Design and UX Design
User-focused vs pixel-focused
Graphic designers tend to pursue pixel perfection in their designs. Ensuring that texts have perfect kerning and colors conform to brand guidelines often take up a significant portion of graphic designers’ jobs—and for good reason, too. UX designers, however, are primarily focused on users. They study the interface between users and the product, finding ways to ensure that the product answers to the user’s key needs. And they do so by conducting a lot of research—by talking to and observing users, creating user personas and stories, doing usability testing on the products, and many more. Graphic designers looking to switch career tracks will need to do a substantial amount of work finding out how to conduct user research (more about this a bit later on in the article).
Iterative problem solving
UX design is very much an iterative problem solving process, and it can be very different from what you’re used to doing as a graphic designer. It begins with the identification of a problem; this is often found through user research, and if it’s not, it will then be confirmed through user research. There is no point in solving problems that users don’t care about; they won’t pay to solve those problems, and that means your company won’t make money.
From the problem identification stage, more research is conducted into how best to solve the problem in a way that the user will be happy with—usually via observations, surveys, ethnographic studies, etc.
This research then informs the product’s design. Designs are then tested with users to see if the research led to the right solutions. The designs are constantly iterated until research confirms that they are good enough.
Once this happens the product is launched, but the design process is not over. The design will be continually tested and user feedback will be taken, thus beginning a new round of user research. Future improvements to the design will be made based on this feedback.
Multi-disciplinary vs specialized
Graphic design is a specialized discipline, and there is a certain level of craftsmanship and set of specialized skills (such as typography and color theory) required to produce great visuals. UX design, on the other hand, is much more multi-disciplinary and involves many schools of knowledge. UX designers have to constantly learn about human psychology, interaction design, information architecture and user research techniques, just to name a few, in order to create the right solutions to a user’s problems. Don Norman, the man who coined the term “User Experience”, explains that user experience covers “all aspects of the person's experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual.”
The Big Benefit of Graphic Design Experience when Moving to UX Design
Aesthetics
The biggest benefit for graphic designers moving to UX design is that they can make things attractive. A very common misconception about UX design is that good usability trumps aesthetics. On the contrary, good aesthetics have been found to improve the overall user experience of product—by making users more relaxed, creating a positive first impression, and generally just showing that you care(3)
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