Finamore Design

Graphic Design is a com­mer­cial art form of select­ing and arrang­ing visual ele­ments (typog­ra­phy, images, sym­bols, col­ors) to com­mu­ni­cate ideas for a pur­pose (con­vey infor­ma­tion or a mes­sage to an audience).

It is a col­lab­o­ra­tive dis­ci­pline: writ­ers pro­duce words and pho­tog­ra­phers and illus­tra­tors cre­ate images that the designer com­bines to com­plete the visual message.

A graphic designer needs to under­stand how peo­ple respond to color, type, imagery, etc. This is key to get­ting the mes­sage across. In order for us to respond to the con­cept, it is not enough for the image to be appro­pri­ate or beau­ti­ful – the pic­ture and ele­ments must stand for some­thing and they must be pre­sented in a new or inven­tive relationship.

Expand your vocab­u­lary to more than just words. Here are some con­cepts on how you express your ideas in out of the ordi­nary ways:

• Metaphors: fig­ure of speech in which a word or phrase lit­er­ally denot­ing one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to sug­gest a like­ness or anal­ogy between them (ex: swim­ming in money)
• Puns: the usu­ally humor­ous use of a word in such a way as to sug­gest two or more of its mean­ings or the mean­ing of another word sim­i­lar in sound (ex: put it on my bill, said the duck)
• Irony: the use of words to express some­thing other than the lit­eral mean­ing, usu­ally the exact oppo­site (ex: call­ing a line­backer “tiny”)
• Metonymy: the use of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute or with which it is asso­ci­ated (ex: call­ing an busi­ness exec­u­tive a “suit”)

Over the long haul of a designer’s career, one should con­tin­u­ally research the his­tory of the pro­fes­sion; learn who the inno­va­tors were and what they did that was inno­v­a­tive. How did they push the bound­aries of the cur­rent tech­nolo­gies? Look at the bound­aries of your cur­rent tech­nolo­gies and by tak­ing a hint from the past try to recre­ate their think­ing to find ways to push the cur­rent limits.

A short list of the promi­nent graphic design­ers include: Alexy Brodovitch, David Car­son, Herb Lubalin, Ivan Cher­may­eff and Thomas Geis­mar, Lester Beall, Mas­simo and Lella Vignelli, Mil­ton Glaser & Sey­mour Chwast, Neville Brody, Paul Rand, Paula Scher, Piet Zwart, Rudy Van­der­lans and Zuzana Licko, Saul Bass, Tibor Kalman.

Develop your own voice as a designer.

Take risks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Graphic Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.