Graphic Design
Whether you notice it or not, you interact with graphic design nearly all day long. From the billboard you pass by on your way to work to the app interfaces you use every day, graphic design is ever-present.
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Logo Design
Branding Design
Webpage Design
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Increase brand awareness, build trust and drive conversions.
Every graphic you come across has been carefully created to pass on a particular message. And that’s the primary aim of graphic design — to convey an idea with the use of visual elements.
Graphic design has slowly but surely become an inseparable part of brand promotion. In certain cases, images can explain and persuade better than words. With this in mind, successful brands have learned to use various types of graphic design to spread their brand message.
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Success stories
Branding Design for Skild
“I have been working with Passionate for well over a year now on a wide range of design projects. My experience has been excellent. Gor and the team always ensure the work is of the highest quality and delivered in a timely manner. The quality of their work stands out.”
Ecommerce Website for Type Department
- We migrated Type Department from Shopify to WordPress with WooCommerce to enable multi vendor functionality
- All products on the website feature live font testers, all built in WordPress
- The site was featured as a top Elementor website in August 2021
“We’ve been working with Passionate for the last 6 months and their work has been incredible. They are super knowledgeable and have helped us migrate an entire marketplace, and re-designed the site with very minimal issues. Very reliable and dependable with great value. Definitely recommend.”
Branding Design for Hyre
“Passionate asked us if we had any ideas ourselves (we had none) and then they presented us with some excellent ideas for the logo and gave us various colour options on how each of them could look. Any variations we asked her for, she was only too happy to do. Well worth the money and a pleasure to work with.”
Landing Page Website for Rising Ballers
- Rising Ballers needed a concise, yet impactful one-page landing website
- Our web design for the brand emphasises their initiatives, credentials and beautifully shot videos with large typography and vibrant colours
- The site was featured as a top Elementor website in August 2021
“Billie and Gor did an excellent job! Very responsive and nothing was too much trouble – thank you”
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What Is Graphic Design?
If you ask five people what graphic design is, chances are, you’ll get five different answers. This doesn’t mean that the varying definitions you get are wrong, but rather, all of them are partially correct.
In its simplest definition, graphic design is the planning and creation of visual content to communicate a message or idea. So, yeah, graphic design is a broad concept.
The term first made an appearance in the print industry in the 1920s. But if you want to trace the practice of graphic design to its very origin, you’ll have to take a deeper plunge into history all the way back to cave paintings.
With its rich history and broad application, graphic design is quite a comprehensive craft involving a lot of elements. Let’s explore the main graphic design elements below.
Core Graphic Design Elements
Even the most intricate graphic designs are made up of very simple components. Here are the seven core elements that have created every design you’ve ever seen.
Line
As simple as they are, lines can take many appearances — thick, thin, brushed, dotted, dashed, curved, horizontal, diagonal, etc. With the rearrangement of lines, you can create an infinite number of graphics.
Shape
The outline of an object determines its shape. Shapes can be mechanical, organic, or abstract. Mechanical shapes are geometric, while organic shapes resemble natural objects. Abstract shapes include letters and symbols.
Colour
Colour helps to set the mood of a design as it has a strong psychological effect on the human brain. Colours have several characteristics like hue, shade, tint, tone, and intensity.
Value
Value determines the extent of lightness or darkness of an area in a design. A contrast in value is used to separate shapes.
Texture
A common way to add depth to a design is to give objects a texture. Be it soft, rough, smooth, rugged, wooden, or fluffy — texture combines lines, shapes, and colours to achieve a visual illusion.
Size
Size allows designers to show contrast, highlight importance, and create a hierarchy to guide the viewer through the design. Components larger in size gravitate attention, creating focal points for the graphic.
Space
Graphic design uses space to separate items or sections, explain the relationship between objects, and create the illusion of a 3D environment. White or negative space forms the background of a design, allowing other elements to pop.
At its core, graphic design is a highly creative craft and will always remain so. However, it’s still guided by a set of principles. Some of the essential graphic design principles are balance, contrast, emphasis, repetition, white space, hierarchy, and more.
Good design is one that employs inventiveness and imagination but also adheres to design principles. It’s the most effective way to ensure your design communicates a message in a clear, structured manner.
7 Types of Graphic Design
The term “graphic design” encompasses various types of graphics that can be significantly different from one another in their application as well as the design process. Let’s unpack graphic design by taking a look at its major types.
1. Brand Identity Design
Every company has a unique personality that reflects itself through the brand’s identity. The process of strategically shaping brand identity is known as branding design. It includes all the visual components of a brand that provide the latter with a distinct look and feel.
The primary challenge for branding design is to share the business’s essence, message, and values through visuals. Designers achieve this by smartly combining lines, shapes, colours, and images.
Next time you interact with your favourite brand, pay attention to the subtle design elements they implement and notice what emotions they give rise to. It’s the best way to truly comprehend the power of great brand design.
Brand identity design involves the creation of logos, brand colour palettes, typography, icons, mockups, and so on. Naturally, all these elements have to perfectly align with one another to create a coherent brand identity.
In addition to the fundamental visual assets of a brand, brand identity design also incorporates brand style guides. As a unified document that amasses all the brand’s visual assets, a style guide also provides guidelines for correctly applying those assets.
Where should your logo be placed on documents and business cards? What’s the smallest font size to use for your brand name? How much white space should be left around your logo? These questions may seem trivial, but they play a big role in ensuring consistent brand presentation across multiple channels.
It’s by no mistake companies like Apple go the extra mile to protect and spread their brand guidelines. It’s enough to have a look at the Apple Identity Guidelines to see how meticulous they are about the proper application of all their visual assets.
2. Marketing and Advertising Design
Since modern-day marketing is very visual-driven, the role of graphic design in advertising continues to grow. Nowadays, most platforms are rich with high-quality visuals, so brands need to put extra effort and thought into their content to stand out. Hence, the plenitude of attention-grabbing ad materials on social media, websites, and other online platforms.
Promotional graphic design has grown into a separate area of specialisation with its own rules and best practices. Marketing designers work closely with company owners or marketers to produce designs tailored to the brand’s unique niche, target audience, and marketing goals.
Marketing and advertising design can involve both digital and physical graphics. The latter includes print materials, such as posters, billboards, banners, magazines, brochures, flyers, etc. Digital graphics can range from social media post designs to infographics, email templates, and PowerPoint presentations.
Similar to branding design, marketing design needs to be an excellent communicator that establishes an instant connection with the audience. Marketing graphics should be clear about the value of the advertised product/service while avoiding coming off as pushy.
3. Web and Mobile UI Design
As one of the key factors of a positive brand experience, web design has a massive influence on the client’s decision-making. Nothing can make or break a user’s perception of a brand, quite like a business website.
Think of all the times you’ve eagerly opened a website only to find out it has a terribly slow load speed or poor UI design. Were you just as eager to return to the site next time, if ever at all? We thought so!
User interface (UI) design dictates the user’s flow through a website and how they interact with it. It works just the same for mobile app design, although the play area and best practices can be quite different.
UI graphic design specialises in constructing a user interface with menus, buttons, typography, graphics, illustrations, and so on. Whether meant for a computer screen or mobile, UI design should be intuitive and easy to use.
Although highly dependent on user experience design and web or app development, UI still shouldn’t be confused with the two. A good UI designer will likely be familiar with user experience principles and even programming languages. Still, their area of expertise is creating an interface that’s visually attractive, well-structured, and effortless to use.
4. Packaging Design
Branded product packaging has been around since the 1890s, but even today, many companies undervalue or altogether dismiss its marketing potential. Whatever your product packaging may look like (box, bottle, can, container, paper bag, etc.), it can be used to reinforce your brand message.
If you’re ready to make your product packaging a marketing tool, you should turn to package designers. With the help of mockups, they will visualise the design concepts and get them ready for print. As packaging design and print are closely interrelated, a designer in this field needs to be knowledgeable in both.
Product packaging also goes hand-in-hand with label design and product photography. Often, a designer will end up creating not only a single package but also its adaptation on a variety of items. It’s crucial that your packaging is consistent from one product to another to build a solid visual identity.
5. Print Graphic Design
Perhaps, the most classic type of graphic design is print that’s published and publicised to share news or messages. Books, magazines, newspapers, brochures, and similar materials fall under this category. And in today’s digital era, these assets are created and distributed both online and offline.
Graphic design for print includes creating a design layout, choosing typography and colour schemes, producing accompanying illustrations and photography if needed, etc. Print designers closely collaborate with publishers to deliver print-ready graphics.
6. Motion Graphic Design
As the name implies, motion graphic design produces graphics in motion. Motion graphics can be quite diverse, from short, simple animated GIFs to full-range videos. Businesses often utilise motion graphics to create logo animations, engaging typography videos, social video ads, and the like.
Motion graphics grew popular with the advancement of animation software which led to a surge in animated content. Companies have taken advantage of this to diversify their content, draw more attention to their brand message, and create a more approachable brand image.
Motion designers often need strong skills in graphic design, animation, filmmaking, and video production. Although motion graphics and animation are two distinct fields, they tend to intersect a lot.
7. Illustration Graphic Design
Graphic art and illustration are complete art forms on their own; however, they frequently appear in branding and advertising materials. In this context, they can be classified into a separate type of graphic design.
Graphic artists typically work with managers, marketers, writers, and art directors to create 2D or 3D illustrations, brand mascots, company logos, graphic novels, and more. Illustration involves a lot more meticulous drawing and painting, which is why many illustrators have a background in fine arts.
The Graphic Design Process
Now that we’ve walked through the seven graphic design types, the next big question to address is what the graphic design process looks like. Neat, intricate graphics aren’t created in a snap, as much as we wish that were the case. Instead, they’re the product of an elaborate, careful graphic design process.
From the development of a somewhat vague design concept to the ecstatic moment of final delivery, graphic designs go through four phases: discovery, creation, feedback, and delivery.
- Discovery: The first stage of the design process commences with the client — in this case, the brand — presenting their requests and expectations. Based on the creative brief, the designer will begin diving into research, mood boarding, and coming up with the first concepts.
- Creation: After collecting enough supporting data, the graphic designer begins producing sketches for the first draft. The client will review the draft and give their first feedback. Taking the feedback into consideration, the designer will move forward with building the design.
- Feedback: This is where the artist presents the final work to the client for review. If necessary or as agreed upon, the designer will complete one or multiple rounds of revisions.
- Delivery: Once the client is satisfied with the final product, the graphic designer or agency will deliver the design files. In exchange, the client will process the payment as specified in the contract.
Although the different types of graphic design will involve different specialists with specific skill sets, the core design process will remain the same.
How Can a Graphic Design Agency Help?
The whole graphic design process is infinitely smoother and more efficient with a graphic design agency. Whereas working with a freelance designer requires constant communication and active guidance, hiring an agency won’t require a hands-on approach from you.
Graphic design agencies will take care of briefing, project management, and quality assurance. Besides defining your expectations and preferences, there’s little you will have to do as a client. Since the reputation of the agency is at stake here, most agencies will go above and beyond to deliver a top-quality product.
Another big advantage agencies have is that instead of a single individual, a whole team of specialists will be working on your project. Because of this, many agencies will offer additional services like copywriting or search engine optimisation.
Of course, the cost does increase when you work with a professional agency instead of a solo freelancer. But so does the quality of the end product. Agencies are recommended for businesses that aren’t too restricted by their budget and need excellent results with as little risk involved as possible.
Final Words
Graphic design is a broad concept with multiple areas of specialisation. When starting a new design project, it can save you a lot of time to know what type of design services you need. With a clear vision for your project and the right kind of expert, you will stack all odds in your favour.
The more you know about graphic design elements, types, and processes, the clearer you’ll be able to communicate with the designer or agency. We hope you found the clarification you were looking for with our guide!
General FAQ
What is graphic design in simple words?
Graphic design is the practice of using visual elements to represent an idea or message. All graphics consist of basic design elements such as line, colour, shape, space, and so on.
How can I use graphic design to promote my business?
Graphic design is essential to create a visual brand identity that consumers will recognise. It will also allow you to make promotional content like social media images and videos, website design, business cards, flyers, brochures, and more.
What are current graphic design trends?
The biggest graphic design trends include retro-futurism, comics and pop art, psychedelic design, black-and-white design, nature-inspired design, voxel art, and others.
