Unless you’ve gone full hermit-in-the-woods, graphic design is everywhere around you. Reading this post on your digital screen after navigating to it through the graphic user interface on your device is made possible through graphic design. But what, specifically, makes it important? That’s a really big question.
Let's start way, way back, when the value of graphic design first becomes apparent: with the emergence of drawn and written communication. Recognizable forms and visual language shared by groups of people allowed them to communicate in new ways that replaced, supplemented, or recorded verbal communication. This foundational element of large-scale human civilization cannot be understated.
Humans are visual creatures. Even before this earliest written communication, we have used our eyes to quickly assess situations and make quick decisions.
But, that’s ancient history. Right? Why is graphic design important today? And more specifically…
Why is graphic design important for business?
As with early human communication, the importance of graphic design for business can also not be understated. And it’s important for many of the same reasons. Let’s take a look.
Graphic design for communication and clarity
These are table stakes.
The most basic benefit of graphic design is in clear communication. Design principles like visual hierarchy, white space, and color theory help achieve clarity in a body of content. Intricate topics, complex data, potentially confusing instructions all are easier to follow when graphic design skills are applied. We see this at play on websites, brochures, books, maps, instructions, exhibits, and just about everywhere else content is presented.
Accessibility is a specific design principle that is focused on removing barriers to content. Designing and illustrating instructions without the need for text removes the language barrier. Designing typefaces for optimal legibility addresses vision barriers. This has become important enough that search engines are taking accessibility into consideration as they rank search results. And it’s good business—it increases your audience.
Navigation and wayfinding are another area where graphic design has an outsized importance. This can include the Graphic User Interface, which made the operation of computers accessible to those of us who don’t write code. It includes the design of your map application on your smartphone. And it shows up in the physical world around us as design systems and maps to help us navigate the subway, campus wayfinding to help you find the library, and an event map that helps you navigate three floors of exhibits and presenters.
Clear communication is essential to the operation of business, but isn’t always about growing a business. That's were we get into influence.
Graphic design for influencing decisions (a.k.a. marketing)
Fight or flight. Eat or retreat. The decision to stay or run like hell is NOT an example of graphic design, but it is one of the earliest examples of humans making decisions quickly based on visual short cuts. These shortcuts were likely based on a type of movement, size, speed, color, smell, texture, or pattern. Even today, these shortcuts remain, and sometimes send our lizard brains recoiling from a threatening form without bothering to consult the frontal lobe.
Humans still use our eyes to make decisions, making an alarming number of decisions not based on safety, danger, merit, or fact, but based on a cursory look and first impression. Examples of this? We judge books by their cover, wine by the label, people by their clothes, lawyers by their logo, and mac & cheese by its box.
This is the domain of your brand—how your audience perceives your organization.
Graphic designers like us and our marketer friends create brand systems and campaigns that appeal to your specific audience to influence their decisions to take a specific action (buy the thing). Why does this work? Because your clients and customers will first assess the credibility, quality, value, and relevance of your company, your service, or your product with their eyes.
- The brand identity and logo for a law firm that projects trust, credibility, class, and sets some expectations about price point.
- The website for the senior living facility designed to reassure the adult children and lead them to request a tour.
- The brochure for the school that projects warmth, joy, and hope.
- The event’s environmental graphics that build anticipation and excitement, while they also manage the flow of attendees.
Your audience will also take cues from graphic design to quickly assess the shared values of your organization. For example, the use of red- or blue-dominant design to advertise political affiliation. Or the use of green and natural tones on food packaging to imply shared values around health and ecology.
We can think of all these as visual heuristics. When we can’t be bothered to inform our decision properly through research and testing, we use these visual cues to speed up our decision making.
Societal impact
A little sidebar here about the impact of graphic design on society—not just business.
- Propaganda is overt manipulation through graphic design and written content. Whether you see it as good or bad will likely come down to which side of an issue (or war) you identify with.
- Graphic design is used as a tool for cultural reinforcement. Consider national or religious icons, text, and visual conventions. All can be considered works of graphic design, and all are there to keep a specific audience engaged with a cultural institution.
- Graphic design is used to present, and sometimes to color the reporting of news and events. The same piece of news can be presented as frightening or calming, simply in the use of different words, typefaces, and color. Politicians and cable news channels with biased agendas rely on the power of design to make a non-issue seem critical, or to make light of critical news.
- Persuasive design is a tactic used by casinos, game designers, and technology companies to increase the time we spend on their platform. If you’ve caught yourself mindlessly scrolling LinkedIn for 45 minutes when all you intended was to send a quick note, you’ll know what I’m talking about. They hack our dopamine by serving up the occasional reward, and it works.
- And finally, AI will likely find its most nefarious uses here. Graphic design for propaganda that deepens cultural divides, skews or fabricates current events, and keeps us doom-scrolling through it all. (I’m writing this in the Fall of 2023, a year out from the next presidential election).
So, then… why is graphic design so important?
If we boil all this down to the simplest answer, graphic design is so important because humans are, and will always be, visual creatures.
As we have for millennia, we will continue to rely on our eyes to quickly assess situations and make quick decisions (and more and more of that will be in the digital realm).
Be aware of the role of design in your life. Is it making things clearer or easier? How is it influencing your feelings about something? And if you are in business, understand that graphic design can and does affect every interaction with your customers and marketplace. Neglecting to consider and use that to your advantage (ethically) is missing an opportunity for growth and success.
A few ways we work with clients
Brand assessment
This diagnostic is our lightest engagement and easiest entry point for those who aren’t sure about what’s working or not, and where to start.
Logo & brand design
Our core creative service, brand design is for those who have strong business strategy in place, and a clear, documented understanding of their audience and competitors.
Strategy and design
With big changes to the business—new leadership, markets, and direction—a big change to the brand will follow. We develop brand strategy and positioning, and then move into design.