Graphic design is a
craft where professionals create visual content to communicate messages. By
applying visual hierarchy and page layout techniques, 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.
Graphic Design is about Molding the User
Experience Visually
Graphic design is an ancient craft, dating back
past Egyptian hieroglyphs to at least 17,000-year-old cave paintings. It’s a
term that originated in the 1920s’ print industry. It continues to cover a
range of activities including logo creation. Graphic design in this sense
concerns aesthetic appeal and marketing. Graphic designers attract 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. That means you need to focus
on—and seek to empathize the most with—your specific users while you create
good-looking designs that maximize usability. Aesthetics must serve a
purpose—in UX design we don’t create art for art’s sake. So, graphic designers
must branch into visual design. When designing for UX, you should:
Consider
the information architecture of your interactive designs to ensure
accessibility for users.
Leverage graphic design skills to create work
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 taps, its designer 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.
Graphic Design is Emotional Design
Although to work in the digital age means you
must design with interactive software, graphic design still revolves around
age-old principles. It’s crucial that you strike the right chord with users
from their first glance—hence, graphic design’s correspondence with emotional
design. 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 or happiness). You also need to design for the overall
effect, and note how you shape users’ emotions as you guide them from, for
instance, a landing page to a call to action. Often, graphic designers are
involved in motion design for smaller screens. They will carefully monitor how
their works’ aesthetics match their users’ expectations. They can enhance their
designs’ usability in a flowing, seamless experience by anticipating the users’
needs and mindsets. With user psychology in mind, it’s important to stay
focused on some especially weighty graphic design considerations, namely these:
Symmetry and Balance (including symmetry types)
1. Flow
2. Repetition
3. Pattern
4. The
Golden Ratio (i.e., proportions of 1:1.6:18)
5. The
Rule of Thirds (i.e., how users’ eyes recognize good layout)
6. Typography
(encompassing everything from font choice to heading weight)
7. Audience
Culture (regarding color use—e.g., red as an alert or, in some Eastern
cultures, a signal of good fortune—and reading pattern: e.g., left to right in
Western cultures)
Overall, your
mission—as far as graphic design goes in UX and UI design—is to display
information harmoniously. You should ensure that beauty and usability go hand
in hand, and therefore your design can discreetly carry your organization’s
ideals to your users. When you establish a trustworthy visual presence, you
hint to users that you know what they want to do – not just because you’ve
arranged aesthetically pleasing elements that are where your users expect to
find them, or help them intuit their way around, but because the values which
your designs display mirror theirs, too. Your visual content will quickly
decide your design’s fate, so be sure not to overlook the slightest trigger
that may put users off
