Good design: An insight.
Design is not art
Every designer will tell you ‘we do not create for self-expression’, we use graphic design to evoke a service to solve communication problems within a B2B or B2C marketplace – this therefore helps market a product or service.
Graphic Design – The World’s most underrated profession
Clients always think graphic design is easy and will want us (designers) to work for nothing. Purchasing Adobe’s Creative Suite will not make you a designer, nor will it make you a better graphic designer. Most clients will not appreciate good design, marketing or advertising. What good designers do is lengthy and poised with problem solving – getting the end user to be evoked into a call-to-action is not easy.
Designers are always on the move as the world in which we live in is constantly changing and a designers role is to make peoples life easier, so a designer must move with the times to give clients what ‘they want’. A good graphic designer never stops learning, thinking, observing or improving and designers need to observe everything through everyones eyes to make design better.
Graphic design is not just placing images and text on a blank canvas and submitting that to the client. A huge amount of technique and knowledge is hidden in every design-piece, and a good designer will be able to extract this from an advert, poster, website or piece of marketing. Having to know every production technique from; printing, multimedia and web – then mixing that up with the years of training in software and hardware. Also having to know ’the rules’ of design along with all the psychology, economics, politics, sociology, linguistics, culture, aesthetics and many other fields to understand and utilise them to create a great design that suits every audience. All this makes graphic design a very specialised profession which should not be underrated.
Learn to walk before you can run
Of course, we all have this dream of breaking the rules, after all, rules are meant to be broken they say. However before you break the rules, you need to know what the rules are, what rules are you breaking, and you better have a heck good of a reason of why are you breaking it. Pleading “I want to go against the rules!” doesn’t work. Solid rationale does.
Form AND function makes good design
Form follows function, that’s the golden rule. If you make something very cool and neat and nobody knows how to use it, then why make it at all? If it’s not designed to make people’s life easier, then it’s not a good design. A design is a failure if it’s not functional. This idea has been brought down for hundred years and more since the Bauhaus movement.
