Graphic Design is not only visual communication, but also visual problem solving; sometimes we find a need for our work, other times we’re assigned it. Design is used to communicate a concept, idea, message, or strategy. It focuses on a central message, a call to action, and can inspire viewers and ensure your message is understood. Design can also cause problems of its own; when one question is answered, more emerge.
Our task as designers is to understand the problem, envision both the possibilities of how to communicate best as well as what viewer perception may be, and create something that meets criteria and makes the message clear, concise, and aesthetically pleasing.
View the quotes below and use them for the correlating design assignments.
Matthew Butterick
Times New Roman is not a font choice so much as the absence of a font choice, like the blackness of deep space is not a color.
Helmut Schmid
Typography needs to be audible. Typography needs to be felt. Typography needs to be experienced.
Adrian Frutiger
When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.
Frank Lloyd Wright
You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site.
Debbie Millman
My argument is that all graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible. That’s our job.
Stefan Sagmeister
You can have an art experience in front of Rembrandt… or in front of a piece of graphic design.
Erik Ardigard
Design is in everything we make, but it’s also between those things. It’s a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.
Charles Eames
Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.
Piet Hein
Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.
Alina Wheeler
Design is intelligence made visible.
Joe Sparano
Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.
Hans Hofmann
Design is the intermediary between information and understanding.
Robert L. Peters
Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.
Juan-Carlos Fernandez
Bad design is smoke, while good design is a mirror.
Issey Miyake
Design is not for philosophy, it’s for life.
Massimo Vignelli
…For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design.