Monthly Archive for May, 2008

What is Graphic Design exactly? I really thought I knew, but of late it’s become more con­fused and gray. Why does Graphic Design exist? The pur­pose is util­ity, not art. The pur­pose of Graphic Design is clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion. This isn’t meant to be a def­i­nite answer, but to start some sort of dia­logue about what Graphic Design is.

Work­ing with clients
In this view, a client comes to you with a job. You take the con­tent you and try to mold it into the most com­pelling out­come. The main feed­back that you get is from the client. From my (lim­ited) expe­ri­ence, this is how the print world works. You can pro­pose dif­fer­ent ideas to the client and try to sell them on what would work best. It feels very intu­itive. Your deci­sions are often based on expe­ri­ence and what you know has worked in the past.

The eco­nom­ics of Graphic Design
A Graphic Designer is not self suf­fi­cient. The very nature of the pro­fes­sion depends upon oth­ers. Graphic Design­ers work for the client, for the money. That’s what it really comes down to. It is love of the the craft, but it does make a liv­ing. Think­ing about the eco­nom­ics of Graphic Design becomes much more inter­est­ing and mea­sur­able when it comes to the web. A lot of what I’ve been learn­ing at my new job is this. Design is mea­sured by its suc­cess. How many peo­ple com­plete the form? What are the num­bers? Do peo­ple pre­fer red to blue? And what not. What is good Graphic Design in this model? Is it good if it sells a lot but looks like garbage?

Aes­thet­ics?

What con­sid­er­a­tion should be even to aes­thet­ics? In school we learned that good design fol­lows rules (or breaks them elo­quently). But what if beauty doesn’t sell? Ide­ally, design that fol­lows the rules and is built on a grid and is type­set well will sell. I believe this deeply. But what if you can be math­e­mat­i­cally proven wrong? If this ad makes a lot of money is it good design? If good design is clear com­mu­ni­ca­tion and this ad speaks to peo­ple who are want­ing to refi­nance their home it must be good design? I know you might think, “of course it isn’t good design.” But it has really got me ques­tion­ing things. If weird poorly designed (ha!) flash ads work as a mar­ket­ing tool than who am I to say they aren’t good Graphic Design. Is it me being an elit­ist? Does it really help any­one for me to ream some­body for hav­ing no con­sid­er­a­tion for typesetting?

Type
Lig­a­tures, kern­ing, smart quotes, none of these really exist on the web the way they do tra­di­tion­ally in print. This is a real loss to me. I do what I can, but there are many incon­sis­ten­cies to worry about. There is no way to antic­i­pate for dynamic con­tent. I mean, I have smart quotes hap­pen­ing, I spec­ify font size and line height, but I can’t really force there to be no wid­ows or orphans, espe­cially on con­tent I’m not gen­er­at­ing. Also, I use Hel­vetica for this blog, but if you view it on a Win­dows machine or even in a feed reader chances are you are read­ing it in Arial. Hel­vetica and Arial are 2 fairly dif­fer­ent type­faces (to say the least). They look and work in very dif­fer­ent ways. They will even ren­der dif­fer­ently ren­der in dif­fer­ent browsers on the same oper­at­ing sys­tem. Ugh.

What do you think?
This is not to be a one sided con­ver­sa­tion. What do you think makes good design? You don’t have to be a Graphic Designer to answer this. Are you attracted to ads like the one above? Do you grav­i­tate to min­i­mal­ism and clean design? Do you own a mac? Do you hate anti-aliasing on Windows?