In today’s world of visual communication, design and presentation play a major role in making an impact on people, whether it is in marketing, communication, or just basic dissemination of information.
The term design applies to all communication platforms – from print and audio-visual to electronic and multimedia.
As such, designers play a key role in today’s communication industry, especially those who deal with graphic and website designing. As many experts will tell you, web designing did to graphic design exactly what motion pictures did to still photography.
With communication platforms increasingly encompassing multiple formats, professionals who can handle more than one format find themselves more in demand compared to their peers who excel at working on singular platforms.
Hence, web designers with an understanding of graphic designing are sure to have an edge over others in their field.
Also Read: Is Graphic Design Dead? [Statistics and Latest Trends]
Graphic Designers and Their Responsibilities
The primary task of a graphic designer is to create visual concepts using photos and other art forms to communicate information. They design a variety of products including billboards; advertisements and layouts for magazines and newspapers; logos, posters, and other marketing materials; etc.
Graphic designers find work at advertisement agencies, marketing firms, media establishments, and even publishing companies.
Irrespective of where they are employed, a graphic designer’s core responsibility is to produce eye-catching visuals that make even the most complex of ideas easy to understand.
The key characteristics of good graphic designers can be listed as follows –
- They have a discerning eye for detail when it comes to fonts, layouts and color schemes
- They are familiar with design software like Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, InDesign, AdobeXd, etc.
- They are always on top of the latest market trends and keep updating their knowledge regularly because designing is an ever-evolving field
- Designing can sometimes be an extremely fluid and abstract area of work. Having said that, good graphic designers are intuitive and perceptive people who are good listeners and can understand their clients’ requirements to produce work accordingly
- They are also flexible and amiable by nature and willing to rework designs to meet customer preferences
With time and experience, most graphic designers become experts at particular niches. They choose to deal with specific types of work ranging from product packaging, newspaper and magazine designs, book publishing, advertisement design, etc.
Web Designers and Their Responsibilities
An ideal web designer is a well-balanced mix of a brilliant graphic designer and a tech-savvy coder. As the name suggests, these professionals are responsible for creating websites and deciding on the overall look and feel of it.
The best web designers have a great grasp of coding languages like CSS, SQL, Ruby, or ASP which helps them implement the designs they come with.
They are visual architects who are responsible for the awesome websites we often come across. Not only do they decide the colors, layouts, and fonts to be used on a website, they also have a say on a website’s overall look and feel.
The best websites are the ones that have great user interfaces and are easy to use, and those can be built only by designers with superior artistic skills as well as technological prowess.
When it comes to skill sets, a web designer must possess all the qualities of a graphic designer and go a step above with proficiency in coding languages and an ability to think in terms of the website layout and user-friendliness. To sum it up, they must have a sense of what makes a website easy to use and aesthetically pleasant at the same time.
Bridging the gap
Given the responsibilities, the best web designers should ideally have a firm footing in graphic designing to build their skills upon.
It is somewhat like laying strong foundations to construct a skyscraper. As stated earlier, web designing is too graphic designing what motion pictures are to still photography.
While it is still possible to be a good web designer without knowing graphic designing, an understanding of the latter will separate the greats from the averages. Here’s a list of reasons why web designers must learn graphic designing –
- Visuals are the first thing a website visitor notices. It is important to merge them with text properly to create simple websites that are easy to navigate and good to look at, at the same time
- To be able to convert good content into engaging ones
- To be able to make a good first impression on visitors by providing key information in a simple format
- To be able to tell an engaging story using different elements
- To present cumbersome, data-heavy material in a comprehensible, visual form.
- For businesses, sales data and growth information make more sense to customers when presented in the form of charts and graphs
Why it isn’t crucial to be a graphic designer in order to design amazing websites?
I have worked a lot for various web designing tasks for my clients. I have created numerous business websites, blogs, including this one just by using CMS (WordPress).
In my opinion, you do not have to be a graphic design until you want to create custom graphics for any purpose because your CMS will offer you the desired tools inside your front-end.
If we talk about WordPress, Wix, Zoho, and Squarespace website designing, you will receive a bunch of free themes that will help you customize visuals such as colors, typography, banners, background images, etc.
Again, I am not telling you that you should never learn graphics designing. You can do it you want to learn a new skill. Also, it is going to help you a lot in your web designing tasks when you have to deal with customized projects. However, if you are not a graphic designer, it is not impossible to design websites in any way.
Customizing The Tech Top 10 using CMS (Some Images):
Changing Header section and customizing logos:
Changing website colors, background, and font structure:
An example for you
While it is possible to ride a motorbike without knowing how to ride a bicycle, the rider’s sense of balance and posture is far sharper if they are proficient in the latter. The same can be said about the need to know graphic designing for web designers.
Only when a designer knows the basics of layout and design on paper can they handle the added pressure put by time and interactivity, well. A website can be highly advanced in terms of technology, but if it is not user friendly then the whole effort goes down the drain.
An effective website combines hi-tech coding with simple, comprehensible visuals and graphics – an amalgamation that can only be arrived at by a web designer who understands graphic designs well.
Time spent learning graphic designing can prove to be a worthy investment for a web designer who wants to make their name in the industry.
This is because only when the foundations are strong can a professional thrive in an ever-changing and constantly evolving industry like designing. Also, the roots of most successful websites are embedded in the way information is made visually appealing, hence underlining the need for the designers’ understanding of graphics.
Final Verdict
I hope this article has helped you to get the answer you were looking for. Go to The Tech Top 10’s section for graphic designers. You will surely be able to get answers to various other questions related to graphic designing.