This time, we will be discussing digital and print media designers in depth, as well as shedding light to the world of corporate design and the joys of freelance.

Print Design

No matter what form it comes in, any sort of published material relies heavily on graphic designers one way or the other. To put it in perspective—if the writers are the meat of the sandwich, the graphic designers would have to be the bread.

Yep, that’s us. We’re that good.

The reason behind this is that the human mind tends to analyze images better than words. After all, it’s a lot easier for the brain to just look at a painting and deduce its meaning rather than to decode a string of text.

Letterheads, advertisement flyers, canvas banners—all these elements of branding and advertising are the fruits of a digital designer’s labor. Each element of the graphical installation—so to speak—is painstakingly assembled by the artist.

There’s a large margin of error when it comes to graphics design, and that’s not something that the advertising sector can live with, so artists have to go through revision after revision of a given picture. Sounds mind-numbing? You bet.

The Internet

With the advent of digital media and the world-wide Internet market, digital artists found for themselves another niche to tackle. Here in Dubai, web design isn’t a particularly difficult profession; you can find designers wherever you looked.

But the large population of skilled artisans doesn’t even skim the surface of how difficult web design can be.

The biggest problem when it comes to this implementation of digital design is that you have to know your HTML. And sometimes, various other programming languages, too.

It isn’t enough to have the pictures you want up on your website. Arranging the elements on a page is an important factor of web design today, and most digital web designers are usually tasked to create templates, flash videos and additional graphics for client websites.

Tools of the Trade

Adobe produces nearly half of all the most popular tools in digital design

Some of the tools used in freelance graphic design to create graphics include, but are not limited to, the following:

These are just some of the tools used within the design industry. There are plenty others that offer a wide range of functions aside from standard graphics creation, but these are some of the most basic programs you’ll find in a creative graphic designer’s computer.

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Open up your computer, and load your favorite webpage. Look at what you see. Go through blogs and corporate websites, or even check the front-page news of your online newspaper of choice.

Why do the websites look like that?

The process of creating digital elements that show up on various media both in print and electronic is called digital design. Graphic artists and creative designers who work exclusively on these two formats are called digital designers.

If writers are the meat, these guys are the backbone of digital media. They are responsible for creating eye-catching graphics that will draw the viewer’s attention to the printed page, or to the website. Without digital designers, we may very well have been stuck with computers that used the command line alone.

In this section, I’ll give you guys a primer of what digital design is, its breadth and scope, and how you can tell if a so-called designer is worth his price or not.

What Differentiates Digital Designers from Creative Designers?

If creative designers were the professionals responsible for ensuring that the visuals and color schemes for the logo branding and overall image management of a brand were in line with the creative director’s plan of attack, digital designers are the people who do pretty much the same thing—but do so through computers and digital imaging programs.

Like it or not, digital design makes the world go ‘round.

From the description alone, you can tell that the digital artist has a lot of ground to cover. The digital designer in any marketing and branding team is the go-to person when it comes to what the web layout of this promo website, or the layout of that flyer, should look like.

The Two Factions of Digital Design

There are generally two faces in the world of digital design.

One involves the print media. Previously, we mentioned that one of the biggest responsibilities brand management teams had to face was the presentation of printed materials. Creative graphic designers are in charge of this, and are further subdivided into an advertising artwork artist and a print designer.

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Be reminded, however, that the process generally varies with each graphic artist, as every person has his or her own process. But generally, this is how things are in the industry.

The Creative Process

Ahh, the creative process. The end-all, be-all holy grail of every creative type; whenever you see somebody with a MacBook sitting in one corner of a coffee shop, obsessing over the HTML code for a website he’s designing, you know you’d best steer clear lest get yourself bitten.

Yes, stay away from them, folks.

That’s just a stereotype, of course. Not every graphic artist gets so involved in the creative process that he can’t afford to take a break from work and talk to people for a bit.

But the fact remains that the process of creating art in any form is taxing. For a writer, he usually has to go through a rigorous phase of research in order to know what to write about. A graphic artist has to visualize what he has to create in order to put form to imagination. Upon completion, the layout editor has to put the visuals and the text together seamlessly.

In other words, if you strip away the romantic stereotyping the creative process is known for, you end up with a frustratingly difficult flow of work.

But the creative process can still be one of the most fulfilling jobs there is. It all boils down on your personal outlook.

Elements of Style

There are a variety of disciplines and skills that are important in creative design. A newcomer into the field of brand management, creative graphic design and advertising will probably have had experience it at least one of the following fields:

- Visual arts. This is perhaps one of the most basic skills anybody needs in this industry. In order to have graphics to arrange in any given page, agencies need graphic designers who can create visuals needed. Depending on what the agency needs, you’ll be using visual elements created by hand, taken with photography, or made through computer-generated means.

Process at Work

If the completed product is approved by the creative director, the page then goes off to print or publishing, although this isn’t usually the case. Most of the time, you need to go through several revisions before the creative team comes up with a final cut that’s worth printing.

And that’s it for creative graphic design 101, kids. Again, I hope you learned a lot in this session. Tune in again next time for more on the creative side of advertising. See you then!

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Go for a walk in your local mall. Look around, and you’ll see a plethora of advertising, mixing colors and text into one dynamic mix that, to the untrained eye, is just part and parcel of advertising. For a Dubai graphic designer, this cannot be more obvious, but even in the more discreet corners of the world, I wouldn’t be surprised if the long arm of consumerism isn’t present in one way or another.

That, however, is part of a bigger whole. In the creative process, these graphics that you see all around you—anywhere from the overall motif of a billboard to the template of a letterhead—is part of a big process called creative design.

In a nutshell, creative design is the process—and the results of this process—in which images and text are put together in such a way that the completed result becomes a creative draw for the general public.

The Coca-Cola logo is a masterpiece of graphic design

There’s a reason why so much money goes into advertising every year. Businesses usually lack the creative manpower to come up with compelling designs that will help them target and attract the market niche they’re aiming for. To supplement this need for a creative arm, ad agencies employ artists and writers who work on the text and graphical layout of the material to be used by marketing.

If there are multiple disciplines that cover the whole gamut of the visual, literary and musical arts, creative design is the art of competent dissemination of information, or the art of selling through images and words.

Before the Printing Press

But that’s only the twentieth-century application of creative design. Back in the day, before the advent of the movable printing press, creative design was mostly unheard of as a discipline. However, evidence of pre-fourth century creative design processes can be found in a variety of sources.

a page from the Book of Kells

Of course, since most of the population back then didn’t have the capacity to read, it only goes to show that most of the creative graphic design within the pages were put there primarily for the nobility. One could assume that early proponents of creative design were geared towards providing pleasing visual aids for the rich and the powerful.

The term “graphic design,” the proper subject used by advertisers who dabble in creative design and advertising, was coined in the early 20^th century. The dividing line between art and commercial design became more and more defined as more and more experts entered the field. Initially, the acceptance of creative design as a field completely different from the visual arts, but after the Second World War, the booming economy in the U.S. propagated the need for creative graphic designers.

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It was a direct tactic that worked well. But back then, when you had very little competition to deal with, it wasn’t that difficult to establish your corporate brand identity. That was why traders who sold specialty materials had no trouble getting their wares sold—their reputations sold themselves!

Do What Apple Did

That’s where establishing brand identity comes in. In order to get your reputation to do your job for you, you have to haul ass for your reputation. And sometimes, that involves not just making sure people know what you’re selling, but creating a story about your product as well.

Who doesn’t recognize this brand?

After a series of failed attempts at reinventing themselves, the introduction of the iMac’s design and sleek interface brought interest back to Apple’s Macintosh series. Seeing as how the hip and trendy and artistic niche caught on to the iMac’s appeal, Apple started a brand identity that simply said that Apple was the definition of hip. Even the logo branding (see picture above) evolved from the old Apple logo, as seen below:

See what I’m getting at here?

The Identity is in the Approach

Apple took two approaches in branding here. The first one involved company name branding, wherein by proving that their technology delivered, Apple assured its users that they got what they paid for.

And what did they pay for, exactly? Why, the quality that came with the “I” trademark, of course. The “I” was the brainchild of creative graphic design, but due to the hype created by the sudden burst of user reviews, the brand became an iconic brand that represented an attitude or a way of life—two brand approaches at the same time.

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I mean, think about it—who would trust a grocer who’s disturbing the peace? Well, sort of. They know about you, great. But they’d remember you as that guy who went around town, waking everybody up with your bullhorn and your noisy vehicle.

The Basics of Branding

For most people, the brand name is the brand itself. That’s a common misconception—the brand is the complete identity of a product or trademark, while the brand name is what it says it is: a name. However, along with your logo branding, the brand name is probably the first thing potential consumers will see, so don’t play down the importance of your brand name!

The brand name is the most basic, but possibly the most fundamental, element of brand management. Next time, we’ll start discussing corporate branding identity and how to maintain that identity throughout your market.

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