What Graphic Design Is For

Design is communication, not decoration

A design succeeds when the right person understands the right thing and does something about it. Beautiful work that fails to communicate has failed, and ugly work that communicates has, awkwardly, succeeded.

This is why "do you like it?" is the wrong question to ask a client, and the wrong question to ask yourself.

The right question

What is this for, and who is it for?

A poster for a tuition centre, seen from across a road, in three seconds, by a parent. That brief already tells you the type must be large, the message must be short, and the phone number must be readable from a distance.

Most bad design is not the result of poor taste. It is the result of never having asked what the piece had to do.

What you are really learning

• Hierarchy — what should be read first, second, third
• Contrast — how difference creates attention
• Alignment — how order creates calm
• Space — why the empty parts do most of the work
• Repetition — how consistency creates recognition

Everything else — software, effects, trends — is downstream of these five.

The habit that makes designers

Start looking at every sign, packet and poster you pass and asking what was decided and why. Photograph the bad ones. You will learn more from a badly set menu in a local restaurant than from a week of tutorials.