Let’s assume you want to announce or sell something, amuse or persuade someone, explain a complicated system or demonstrate a process.
How do you do that?
You could tell people (verbally) one by one or broadcast by radio or loudspeaker. Or you could be more visual and make a poster or create a billboard; type a letter or make a flyer; create a business logo, a magazine ad, or an album cover. That visualization process is graphic design.
Design is a creative process; it is an investment in innovative thinking, positioning, branding and communication that creates value for businesses in terms of competitive advantage, customer trust and loyalty, and market share.
Good graphic designers know where your audience is likely to look when reading a brochure or restaurant menu, how your eye might travel across a website page, what colours appeal to what audiences and how to knit that all together to maximize your ROI.
Graphic design and illustration overlap, but for simplicity’s sake, we’re going to differentiate them such that where graphic design looks at the whole, illustration is more about the smaller components. For example you might need an illustration (chart or infographic) to make visual sense your company’s mountain of financial data which would be placed into your company’s graphically designed annual report, investor prospectus, or website.
Although we have a variety of digital media through which we communicate, we still print it, PDF it, mail it, email it and fax it for later review. Many of us still communicate, inform, educate, advertise and market through print.
Illustrations help tell your story by augmenting the words and providing a visual point of reference.
Printed material is still the “mass” and “direct” marketing favourite, from tri-fold brochures, to tradeshow handouts to newspaper and magazine adverts. Give the Imagination Factory a call and let the storytellers there tell your story.
