What is graphic design?

Neville Brody

Co-Founder and Partner, Research Studios

Graphic designers as management consultants

Graphic designers and visual communicators are management consultants. They’re not just people who sit in a pub in Hackney and hold up their latest logos.

Quentin Newark

Graphic Design Consultant and Partner, Atelier Works

Graphic design communicates

Graphic design is about communication, and it communicates through the combination of images and words.

Andrew Stevens

Graphic Designer and Co-Founder, Graphic Thought Facility

Defining a graphic designer

If I’m trying to explain to somebody what a graphic designer is I might often take the easy way out and say, you know, we design like books and record covers and stuff and often the questions don’t go any further than that, so that’s, that’s fine.

Tim Fendley

Chairman and Creative Director, Applied Information Group

Facets of graphic design

Graphic design has many different facets, like I think any form of architecture.

Quentin Newark

The role of the graphic designer as communicator

The job of a graphic designer is to understand the material that they are trying to communicate, whether that be the nature of a company or the content of a book; to understand that material and then make an appropriate and unique design that communicates that content.

Neville Brody

The designer's responsibility

We also have a responsibility towards the people who will have to live with that communication.

Tim Fendley

Information design

I'm an information designer, originally a typographic designer and a graphic designer, but now I work in information design. You could be designing forms or you could be designing websites or you could be designing wayfinding systems for buildings or for airports or for cities. It's building understanding in people really quickly so they can allow them to do things.

Morag Myerscough

Graphic Designer and Founder and Director, Studio Myerscough

The graphic designer as interpreter of information

There still is a thing with graphic designers that people think, oh you are the person who does the captions. And you’ve got to stay in that little place over there.

I don’t do design just for myself; that’s where I’m very much… I would never classify really myself as an artist as such, you know. I definitely like solving things. I am much, I am very, inside me is a designer. I love information and I love interpreting that information.

Neville Brody

The wide reach of graphic design

Graphic design, I think, was a very specific, tight niche and it may be something you study at college but when you come out, you realise that that’s just scratching the surface of what this is about.

Huw Morgan

Graphic Designer and Partner, Graphic Thought Facility

The effects of graphic design on everyday life

When you break it down into single parts, we do book jackets, we do record covers, we do logo designs, it sounds really dry, it sounds really dull, and I think a lot of people don’t quite realise how much it touches on their lives or the subconscious pleasures it can give or the subconscious ease it can bring to their life.