to these devices.
Graphic design is practiced in numerous fields and media:
- Print - Magazines, newspapers, posters, periodicals, business collateral materials, printadvertisements
- World wide web and software user interfaces
- Film, videos, CDs, DVDs - title design, motion graphics, promotional materials
- Identity systems, environmental graphic design including signage, wayfinding, and retail
- environments
- Products, packaging, point-of-purchase displays
The key is to first differentiate graphic design from graphic arts. Graphic design is all about the dynamic that exists between what is being created and the audience, whereas art hinges around the dynamic created between the creator and creation. Design is all about finding the solution to a problem. Graphic art is epitomized by a high-schooler with photoshop messing with effects.
Graphic design is epitomized by geniuses like Joe Duffy, Paul Rand, Stefan Sagmeister, etc.
Software for Design
The best Computer Graphic Design software to date is Photoshop. Photoshop is named the best software by many and out ranks its rival, Paint Shop Pro. Photoshop has all the best tools and with a bit of time and effort, you can produce great work. The industry standard is Adobe. There can be no arguments about that. Adobe provides us with very powerful tools. However, it does have a huge learning curve because of its power. As graphic designers, we use each of these programs and import and export between them for individual tasks.
- Photoshop for retouching or anything to be done in RGB raster work
- for illustration and anything in CMYK vector
- InDesign for page layouts
- Dreamweaver to put our websites together
- InCopy just for copy writing
- Premiere Pro for video editing
- to put a DVD together
- After Effects for video effects
- Flash to make flash programs and animations
- to for our documentation
These programs overlap each other also. For instance, Illustrator could also be used for single page layouts, but InDesign is better for entire books. We can create illustrations in Illustrator, but we can also produce illustrations in Photoshop. It depends on the style you want the illustration to be in, since Photoshop is raster and Illustrator is vector.
Raster vs. Vector
So what's the difference between rasters and vectors?
A "raster" is a grid of colored dots. Imagine taking a sheet of graph paper and drawing a picture by coloring in squares with colored pencils, and you've got a pretty good idea as to what a raster is. You can do a lot with rasters...what you CAN'T do is enlarge them without taking a quality hit. A "vector" is a computer program. It is a series of commands that tell the output device, "draw an oval. Make it five feet long by two feet high, color it orange and put a black line around it." It will proceed to do just that, at the highest resolution the output device supports.
For most of you folks, the major difference between vector and raster is going to be that the files can be smaller in vector (although I've seen some massive vector files), and small type will look better in vector but you can get nicer blends in raster.
Difference between graphic design and web design
Graphic design includes logos and print design. Graphic Design includes anything in the world that you see that has been created and printed (or displayed as part of a layout). This can be ads, magazines, newspaper layouts, newspaper ads, billboards, logos, brochures, books, decals you find on toys, CD labels & booklets, movie posters, and so much more. It encompasses all things in the print world. And it's not just the layout that is created by graphic designers. We also create, well, "graphics," such as those photos you see in magazines - a graphic designer had most likely altered it after the photographer made the shot.
Web design overlaps graphic design in the graphics and overall appearance (layout) and flow of the site/pages, but web design also includes all the technical aspects of creating a website, such as the coding past basic layout.
