- Greetings, everyone.
Welcome to another session on design disciplines.
Today, we will talk about the discipline of graphic design,
also referred to as visual communication design.
(upbeat music)
According to the AIGA,
which is the American Institute of Graphic Arts,
graphic design, also known as communication design,
is the art and practice
of planning and projecting ideas and experiences
with visual and textual content.
But there's quite a few things happening in this definition.
One, it's the art and practice.
So there's an artistic component.
Two, graphic design,
but there's also a certain process and a certain practice.
What does it involve?
Planning and projecting ideas and experiences.
So you spend time planning and figuring out
what the design should be,
what the graphic design should be,
and you project those ideas and experiences
with two kinds of content,
visual content or images,
and textual content or text.
So in a sense,
what graphic design focuses on is creating experiences,
presenting ideas that have images,
but also have some textual information.
The form of communication can be physical or virtual.
So in this case,
graphic design can create things
that are physical in nature.
So printed objects like brochures, posters,
books, et cetera.
Or it could also be virtual,
which could be websites, apps, et cetera.
And then it includes images, words, or graphic forms.
So images as in photographs,
words as in text
or graphic forms as in information graphics or diagrams,
AIGA goes on to say that the work can happen at any scale
from the design of a single postage stamp,
which is really small and one single artifact,
to a national postal signage system.
So for example,
graphic designers can be involved
in designing individual stamps,
or they could also be involved in coming up with a branding,
advertising strategy for a complete postage system
for a country.
Or from a company's digital avatar to the sprawling
and interlinked digital and physical content
of an international newspaper.
So what AIGA is saying is that graphic design
has a broad scale that it participates in.
One could be at the very digital level
in the creation of a character,
or it could be something that's much broader,
digital and physical for something like a newspaper.
We'll talk a little bit more about newspapers later on.
But in a nutshell,
what graphic designers do is they focus on the creation
of essentially artifacts that could be physical or digital,
websites or books, thinking of texts and images.
So this is essentially what graphic designers do.
Let's get into some more details
about some of the specific artifacts
that graphic design creates.
For example, one of the things that graphic designers do
is they create print media.
What does print media include?
Well, it includes books for sure.
It includes magazines.
It also gets into advertising.
What does advertising involve?
Well, you could design a brochure for a company.
You could design posters for a company.
You could create websites,
which now gets into the virtual world.
You could create social media
like campaigns that include Twitter
and other aspects of social media.
Graphic designers often also create
something called corporate identity.
So for an organization or a company,
if you get involved with things like branding,
how do we tell the story of this company?
How do we talk about what the company does
in visual and verbal ways?
This includes things like logo design.
It includes the design of business cards.
It could also design a good design of packaging.
How do you package a product
that a company might be selling?
Which includes the internal components of the packaging,
as well as the box that it goes into,
as well as the graphics that go onto the box.
Graphic designers also get involved with signage.
Signage is also referred to sometimes as wayfinding.
So whether you're in a building
or whether you're out on the street, indoors or outdoors,
can you create systems?
Can you create graphics systems that help people
find their way across a building?
And graphic designers get involved
in what's often referred to as interaction.
Now, we will talk later about this discipline
called interaction design in a bit more detail,
but anything that involves interaction or engagement
between people and what people are looking at,
what they're working with,
what they're structuring their experiences around,
that's called interaction.
This includes things like websites,
it also includes things like mobile applications
that go on smartphones.
Includes the design of icons as well
that we use on regular basis.
And includes motion graphics.
Things that are used in movies,
things that are used on websites
to show how something evolves and changes over time.
All of these aspects and expressions of graphic design.
So as you can see,
graphic designers get involved with a very wide range
of things from extremely physical artifacts like books,
to really virtual things like motion graphics.
Two things to keep in mind with graphic design.
Graphic designers often work with typography, type, text,
and also work with images.
And let's see some examples of how this happens.
So for example, one of the fonts,
one of the type of typographic elements
that we have been using
for this class is a font or a type called Akzidenz-Grotesk.
This is a specific font that was designed
by a German designer.
And as you can see in this image,
it has a range of expressions.
You have the regular font,
you have a light font, you have condensed,
you have medium condensed, you have expanded.
So all of these are different aspects of a specific font.
And font design, it could be a really decorative font,
like what you see in this image with an A,
or very simple and a model looking font
like what you see here,
those are both expressions of font design.
That's something that graphic designers do.
And once a font is designed,
it could have a very physical expression.
Like in this case,
you'd see type blocks that are then used
for actual printing, could be used on a printing press.
This is covered with ink and it's pressed on paper
to create a physical printed document,
or it could also be the design of fonts
that are used virtually,
the things that could be used on a computer as you type,
that specific font appears on the screen.
So typography, dealing with fonts, creating layout,
using type and image are two really important things
that graphic designers do.
In understanding how layout functions,
take the example of a newspaper.
This is one potential way a newspaper could be laid out.
What you see on this newspaper is you see,
initially, you see the title up on top.
There is a specific block or an area for the title.
You might see sections here where you have large fonts.
You might have sections where you have images as well.
And if you look carefully,
you'll also see that there are columns.
There's separation between the columns.
So you have column one, two and three
that spread across the page,
and then you have divisions in between as well.
These are the kinds of things that break up the text.
If you look carefully at a newspaper,
a newspaper has a significant amount of writing,
written material, significant amount of text on it.
If this was one continuous text,
it would be extremely difficult to read.
So one of the things that graphic designers focus on a lot
is the notion of legibility.
How do we make things legible?
So what you see here,
for example, if you look carefully at this space here,
what you see here is called a gutter.
And this essentially is the space in between two columns.
It's this blank space.
But what it does it allows people
to start reading from here, they read like this,
they go up, start reading from here, go down,
start reading this way.
So this often becomes an easy way
by which you can get through long, complicated texts.
So in a sense,
what graphic designers do when they create a page like that
is creation of a layout through construction of a grid.
So what you see here in this image is a grid.
So what you can say, for example, if this is a newspaper
or it's a page in a magazine,
that this could be a section where you have the title,
this could be the large title that could go in here,
and you could have things like there could be an image here,
there could be some written texts over here.
There could be an ad over here, more images, small text.
So this sort of a grid,
what it does is it allows graphic designers to organize
all the data, all the information,
all the texts and the images
in such a way that it becomes easy to read.
It's beautiful to look at.
And also, it's something that allows people to make this
an interesting and exciting experience for themselves
as they go through the magazine or the newspaper.
So this thinking of type, thinking of image
and thinking of layout
are some really, really important things
that graphic designers do as a part of their work.
So graphic designers focusing on design of books,
which could mean the covers of the books,
as well as the layout of all the pages inside.
Graphic designers also work on magazines.
What you see here is a series of magazine covers,
again, same thing here as well.
They will design the covers of the magazines,
but also all the texts and the pages inside.
So what happens very typically
is graphic designers work with writers.
They work with editors,
they provide the information, they provide the text.
They also work with photographers.
Photographers provide the images,
and they often create diagrams.
They create information graphics,
work with the text and the images that is provided to them
to create these magazine covers
as well as the internals of magazines.
What you see here is the notion of a graphic design system.
So for example,
there might be a company
that might need some graphic information
or graphic design done for them.
In that case, you could create a stationary.
For example, you could create a logo
that could then go on the letterhead of the company.
You might create business cards,
you might do some branding on the pen.
You might create an app that goes on the mobile phone.
And also along with that might go on the coffee cup.
So that then becomes a corporate identity system
that the company can use to advertise who it is
and to message what it does.
Business cards are often done by graphic designers.
Essentially, it's an individual identity
that is expressed through this card,
individual as well as a company identity.
This is an example of a corporate identity system.
So what you see here is you see, on the left here,
you see a logo, you see the stationary,
or you see the letterhead of the company.
You see an envelope over here, the envelope opened up.
This could be essentially a brochure
that the company might have,
or a folder that a company could use.
You see business cards.
And then other materials like these are erasers
with the company logo on it, another letterhead,
maybe a CD design as well, pencils.
So all of these artifacts,
all of these things create a corporate identity system.
And that system becomes the expression,
the visual and verbal expression of that company
out into the world.
Let's take an example of a company like Pixabay.
Pixabay is a company that creates,
has a website and it allows, or it collects information,
collects photographs and videos for people to use.
This is essentially the logo of Pixabay,
which has been done by a graphic designer.
You see a logo mark, which is the camera and the photograph.
That's a logo mark of the company.
And they often they're artifacts
like these glasses, for instance,
which have the logo of the company on one of the lenses,
they have a website, you can see the website here.
And you can see the website
wrapped around the coffee mug as well.
So what you see here is the corporate identity system
of Pixabay, of the company,
is visible on its logo, on the logo mark,
on the website, on the coffee mug.
So it expresses itself across all these artifacts.
You can also see it on a business card.
You can see the logo,
the name of the person, contact information.
So this is a part of what graphic design does.
Another element of graphic design is wayfinding or signage.
So as you see here, in this case,
it shows an image of a person running and it shows an arrow.
So this use of again, image and a diagram
or a graphic of an arrow and some text,
which has exit or ausgang,
tells people that this is how you would exit
from this location.
So using signage,
designing signage is also part of what graphic designers do.
One other thing that graphic designers often do
is graphics for computers.
Often on websites, you will see graphics slightly.
So in this case,
what you see here is a three dimensional type called growth.
You see a three-dimensional growth diagram
and you see some 3D images, virtual images
on the image as well.
So what this shows is,
and then in the background, you'll see some gears as well.
So what this shows is a virtual image that has been created
to express the idea of growth.
Very often, these could be animated.
So you can see some movement in some of these.
And what you see in this case, this is motion graphics done
by a Japanese designer, Takashi,
which shows the idea of wind.
And you can see how the images came from the left
and float across the screen to show the idea of wind.
Another example, this is a water.
Here again, the image, the white lines
are coming up from above.
They create the water and then they disappear.
These are examples of motion graphics
that graphic designers often use specific software
to create these kinds of moving type
and image expressions as well.
So to wrap up,
what we've talked about today is the discipline
of graphic design,
which essentially works with type,
works with image and with layout
to create a series of different kinds of artifacts.
These artifacts could be physical, like books, magazines,
brochures, corporate identity systems, stationary,
business cards, et cetera.
Or these could be virtual,
which could be things like websites, mobile applications,
could be motion graphics.
All these are expressions of graphic design.
So in a sense,
graphic designers often work on creating new ideas
and experiences using a range of tools
to get information across in extremely legible ways,
but in beautiful ways as well.
And that is the discipline of graphic design.