Design Sections
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.
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 brand design. It includes all the visual components of a brand that provide the latter with a distinct look and feel.
The primary challenge for brand design is to share the business’s essence, message, and values through visuals. Graphic 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 presence across multiple channels.
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.
Your graphic design services provider, whether it’s a graphic design agency or an in-house designer, must make sure to stick to these rules to create quality graphics for your brand.
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 brand 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.
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.
A graphic design agency will usually provide you with all the necessary design services including web and mobile design.
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 of a variety of items. It’s crucial that your packaging is consistent from one product to another to build a solid visual identity.
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.
When working with a high-quality graphic design agency, you will typically receive all your materials in different formats so that you can use them for different purposes, including print and packaging.
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.
A good graphic design agency usually employs different specialists for each field, so that to provide more high-quality designs. If you want to have all kinds of graphic design services, it’s better to choose a graphic design agency to benefit from their full package services.
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 distinct types 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.