What does a graphic designer do?

In last week's blog, I explained what graphic design is. This week, I want to delve a little deeper and discuss what a graphic designer does.

If you read last week’s blog, you’ll already know that graphic designers are visual communicators.

They use font, shape, line, colour and space to get a message across, for instance the name and brand of an organisation is communicated in a cool logo, or maybe it’s something else like a beautifully formatted white paper, to market your latest product.

Some graphic designers have a degree or other qualification in graphic art, digital art or some other creative field, but many others are self-taught or did evening classes and came to be graphic designers in a non-traditional fashion. Either way is good – it’s not how you got here, it’s what you can do that counts!

Digital artists

I’m not saying designers are artists in the traditional sense, but a good way to understand graphic designers is to consider them as artists who use digital tools. They’re able to look at a design and see all the minutiae – the small details that create it - and then stand back and see the bigger picture, to see if the design as a whole works.

Most designers will use similar tools and software, such as the Adobe Creative Cloud which is a group of over 20 apps. Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign are the three that most people know about, but designers will also use other software depending on their speciality or work history.

For example, I did evening classes using Microsoft Publisher, I have used Microsoft Word and PowerPoint a lot because that was the format that the content I was working on needed to be in.

I have also gone off on a tangent and used Prezi and VideoScribe for the odd project, but my current go-to tools are Adobe InDesign and Illustrator.

If you are looking to hire a designer, remember there is no point picking someone who is brilliant with Photoshop if you need a brochure designed in InDesign. The designer’s skills need to match your project or you will be disappointed.

Skills and knowledge

I have touched on this already, but if a graphic designer is an artist, then they are also very creative. And this skill is actually in demand. According to LinkedIn, creativity is the number one soft skill that companies need for 2020, and it is trending at that position for the second year in a row.

If you’re not feeling very creative or doubting that you could ever be creative yourself, the documentary ‘The Creative Brain’ by neuroscientist and best-selling author, David Eagleman makes for a very good watch. It’s available on Netflix, or you can see the trailer on YouTube.

He explains how the human brain works, and how we are being creative if we can connect two existing items or ideas and come up with something completely amazing, or problem solve in a new or unexpected way.

And this helps explain why designers have to be creative. They are taking how something looks, for instance your brand, and using it with your content (or text) to make something brand new that communicates with your audience.

The way graphic designers use their creativity or carry out their art might be to doodle an idea for a new icon, or to use rough sketches and pictures to try out ideas for layouts.

I regularly do this myself, with good old fashioned pen and paper - even though I wouldn’t say I am particuarly good at drawing! It’s just a quick way of visualising what’s in your head before spending lots of time creating it on a monitor.

Experience, background and compatibility

Another thing to consider, especially if you are looking to work with a graphic designer is their industry knowledge - e.g. have they produced items for print or do they only create digital work for websites. If you are doing something new and unfamiliar to you, it might be better to hire someone with the right experience to they can guide you.

Next, there is their business background to consider. Designers can work anywhere these days, and are no longer limited to businesses with traditional creative outputs such as advertising. For example, my background is in Learning and Development and Marketing which means I understand those two areas very well.

Finally, who you choose should also depend on if you like what they do – by this I mean the designer’s portfolio of work.

This is effectively a compatibility test, which I think is best described as a sliding scale with ‘playing it safe’ at one end and ‘whacky and eccentric’ at the other. Most of the time you need a mix of those two extremes, someone in the middle of that scale. A safe pair of hands with a bit of creative boundary pusher stirred in.

Yes, you want a designer who understands your brief, and yes, you want them to use their design skills… but sometimes you also need someone who can push the boundaries just enough so you get that illusive, imaginative design without breaking your branding rules.

If you need a graphic designer to work with and would appreciate a designer with my skills or background, please get in touch.