DM112 - Graphic Design
Graphic Designers

A professional designer's role is to enhance living by applying a developed sense of aesthetics and utility to the design of the human-made world. Design both shapes and expresses our cultural values. Some designers see themselves as artists, while others prefer to think of themselves as creative problem-solvers. Design concepts and principles provide a basis for understanding how designers apply their skills to design issues as they work to enhance the visual, informational, and mechanical qualities of our material environment.

The word design is both a verb and a noun. Thus design is both a process and a product. To design something, the process, is to organize the various aspects of a work--line, space, light and color, texture, pattern, time and motion--into a totality, a unified whole. One is able to see in that totality something one calls its 'design'--that is, the product. One can recognize in the finished product the process of its organization and composition.

Of all the arts, graphic design comes closest to meeting us in our contemporary daily life. We interact with graphic design on an almost constant basis, and most designers have chosen it as their profession because they relish that close interaction with people in all situations. Many of our encounters with graphic design are even unintentional; we do not often seek out graphic design the way we might seek to view other art forms in a gallery or museum. This fact gives graphic designers an unequalled opportunity to inform, persuade, delight, bore, offend, or repel us.

The term graphic design refers to the process of working with words and pictures to create solutions to problems of visual communication. Much of graphic design involves designing materials to be printed, including books, magazines, brochures, packages, posters, and imagery for electronic media. Such design ranges in scale and complexity from postage stamps and trademarks to billboards, film, video, and web pages.

Graphic design is a creative process employing art and technology to communicate ideas. With control of symbols, type, color, and illustrations, the graphic designer produces visual compositions meant to attract, inform, and persuade a given audience. Under the skilled guidance of a graphic designer, a message becomes visual, transcending words alone.