Quentin Newark
Graphic Design Consultant and Partner, Atelier Works
The image of the graphic designer
20 years ago, if I tried to explain what graphic design was, I would have said it’s designing logos, books, posters, and people would have stared at me as though I was from another planet. Today, if people say what do you do, and I say I’m a graphic designer, they say, oh, I love Sabon [?]. I think the computer and everybody’s use of the computer has made, let’s call it the general public, acutely aware of what it is that a graphic designer does, which is arrange layouts, make things look good, clear; choose typefaces; use those typefaces in an attractive and clear way.
Neville Brody
Co-Founder and Partner, Research Studios
Graphic design as visual language
We create, if you want, what you could call visual languages for various people to use in helping them communicate to a larger public. So that might touch any field, from what you would consider to be like a brand, which is a logo, but that brand logo would touch a lot of other things, like colours, the typefaces that you would be using, the kind of imagery you would use, how you would treat that imagery, how you would put that imagery on a page, where the typeface would sit with that. And then you would think about, well, how does that work in another media? So you would think about, how can you visually communicate that same voice in a website or in an environment or on a shopping bag?
Quentin Newark
Typeface, text and visual communication
There are literally hundreds of thousands of typefaces. So how those typefaces are sized, spaced, how they appear on the page, what kind of colour they are, how you create a hierarchy between the different kind of parts of the text, the headline, and the body text or the chapter heading and the number at the bottom of the page, each one of these is a design decision. You’re having to consider the whole, but then focus on the detailed aspects of the language, or the words, or the piece of text that you are trying to articulate and then communicate.
Neville Brody
The graphic artist as commercial artist
If you go back to someone like Toulouse Lautrec, who is not only heading the business, getting the client brief, figuring out the context and the research and the understanding, then going away and doing the drawing, but he was also doing the main printing as well and then presumably distributing or delivering it back, so from those small beginnings, we have the beginning of… or we have the concept of what we could call a commercial artist. It was only really in the 50s in the US that larger agencies introduced the idea of absolute specialist skills, so then you ended up as a copywriter or the logo designer or the typographer or the illustrator or the print-buyer. So these skills become… became fragmented and you were given a specific hat to wear. What, I think, the personal computer has done and the workstation is bring all of those skill sets back into the same place. So it's kind of come around full circle to a commercial artist, again.
Quentin Newark
Imagery and illustration
Obviously, the other aspect, the other major aspect of graphic design is imagery. And just like with the hundreds of thousands of typefaces or ways of making words, there are dozens and dozens of ways of making pictures. You can use icons, you can use drawings, you can use photography, and photography these days can be manipulated to achieve all kinds of different end results.
There is no single way of making images or using images. Illustration, if you want to be specific about that word, is one aspect of image making, or picture making. Some graphic designers are indistinguishable from illustrators. They are illustrators who also practice graphic design.
In terms of how we decide to make the graphic design that we do, all the elements, the colour, the illustration, the logos, the typography, the way the thing is laid out come either from the client, so in this case, the client had an existing logo, and an existing colour, or they are choices that are in the service of the concept that you’re trying to express.
Morag Myerscough
Graphic Designer and Founder and Director, Studio Myerscough
The graphic designer's instinct
I’ve always approached graphics slightly from over here, you know, and slightly more instinctively. I had to go, the other day, to advise some people on their branding and they were talking to me all about well, the ultimate grid is a five by seven and a three by four. And I was thinking, oh God! [laugh]. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. I just sort of do, I just do things.
Andrew Stevens
Graphic Designer and Co-Founder, Graphic Thought Facility
Core craft skills and emotional understanding
So I think there’s, there’s probably some core skills that graphic designers have up here which is, you might say, from really ground up to do with typography and typographic skills and image selection and image cropping and understanding of print production and, and process, but often, I mean, those skills are, kind of, used in a very low level way on most projects. They’re just about crafting it to make it good. I think to get, to actually get into the core of a project really it’s, kind of, just find an attitude for a response I would say for a client. You know, is it right that this job is illustrated and if so, what kind of fields should it, if we use photography should we commission it, or is there ways to use a resource that, that they have. So, the, the first part of the job is not so much about these craft skills but it’s about trying to act on the right mood for the answer. What, what’s the right mood and the right elements we’re going to draw in, and then there’s, kind of, underlying craft skills are just used to [hand gesture for shaping]