People who don’t really understand what graphic design is tend to define it and limit it to a very narrow role, but it actually has a very broad remit. Graphic design is most precisely described as being all about the realm of visual communication – using the various elements which provide visual stimuli to convey a message with greater precision and impact. You communicate through words and visual stimuli, so you can’t just use a graphic designer to convey a message, but they do tend to play a pivotal role. You may consider much of it to be something of little concern and essentially nitpicking, but numerous studies have clearly shown that people react differently to different visual stimuli, even with something as subtle as the font type used in the written content.
Graphic design has a role to play in virtually every marketing activity, as there are very few marketing platforms which limit your actions to plain text (Pay per click on google’s search engine being the main one). Website design, print advertising, digital marketing, email marketing; all of these are themselves very inclusive marketing avenues and all of them require a consideration of the graphical design of the media that you’re providing to your audience. Besides these broad areas their skills will also be used when designing a product, packaging, signs, logos, branding and publications (to name a few).
The process that a business or individual can enquire about get a graphic designer to work for them usually comes in a number of stages. Firstly you have the thought stage: This is the stage where your thoughts about a design are examined so that goals and values can be established. This is also where you brainstorm various ideas. Secondly you start to develop a number of early design options. This will hopefully give you a better understanding of the different avenues that you can go down, and is where you truly start the process of refining your ideas into the end product. Thirdly you pick and choose the elements that you want from the variety of designs until you’ve got the one you want.