Historically, most graphic design consultancies found their bread and butter occupation in designing for print, in particular annual reports and stationery. Now, much information, communication, marketing and branding is delivered via screens – either through websites or through mobile applications on phones and PDAs. Consequently, digital design is no longer the poor cousin of print design.
‘Most people have either got or have seen an iPhone,’ says Quentin Newark, director of design agency Atelier Works. ‘It will bring about the near complete disappearance of printed materials. As it is now, you can download newspapers to your iPhone, you can read all of Shakespeare; you can download every best seller and read it. There’s going to be little need, or an increasingly smaller need for printed materials. And I think graphic designers will have to learn a whole new set of skills; how to animate, how to make films, how to make their graphic design make sound. ’
Watch a film about Quentin Newark's career in design
While Newark’s polemical view of print’s destiny may be overly apocalyptic, there’s no doubt that graphic designers need to understand how to present visual and informational elements on screens, as well as in printed materials. Of course, digital design involves many elements beyond the visual – coding, interaction, information architecture, knowledge of hardware and perhaps even electronics skills too. But it is the skills of the graphic designer – grounded, as we have seen, in grids, typography and composition – that can bring visual clarity to often complex information on screen.
Nokia N97, designed by Nokia and Microsoft Surface, designed by Microsoft
As Michael Johnson of Johnson Banks says, ‘Having digital skills is not really even a debate any more – it’s just part of the process. Animated iterations of identities are huge now too. Every identity we’ve done over the last few years has had some form of animated version, so that’s something we have to work out.’
Where print is static, screen-based visual information is dynamic and interactively navigable, which brings new challenges to graphic design. But Benjamin Tomlinson, creative director at Ico Design Consultancy, argues that a solid grounding in typography remains the best foundation for approaching digital graphics work. ‘You are always going to be dealing with type and with computers typesetting becomes much more accessible: anyone can set type now, but there’s a need for an understanding of the skill. The grid structure [used in typography] is a framework not only of good type layout, but also for colour, blocks – anything really. And it’s a craft: you get better and better at it over time.’
Digital design brings new types of production collaborations too. Where once a graphic designer might have worked with a printer to source and utilise physical materials, now they might work with a code developer to turn visual ideas into functioning software applications.
The influence of digital is not one-way: the style of logo design exhibited by so-called web 2.0 online services has influenced corporate identity offline too. Web 2.0’s distinctive ‘eye-candy’ identities, with their bright gradients, reflections and soft lines, are now reproducible in physical print thanks to digital printing technologies, which don’t require multiple runs for each colour. ‘With the rise of web and electronic applications more complex logo solutions are being seen,’ says Johnson.
Here's a selection of some well-known web 2.0 style logos.
So, the future of graphic design may well mean more and more work for screens, but print is by no means dead. And although the next generation of graphic designers will work with animation, sound and other multimedia implementations, a traditional grounding in composition, grid structures and typography may continue to be the bedrock for powerful, effective visual communication.