1. Visual identity
The relationship of a business/organization to its audience is known as branding. Brand identity is the way an organization conveys its personality, essence and tone, plus its emotions, experiences and memories. Similarly, visual identity graphic design is the brand identity’s visual elements that function as the face of a brand – so it can convey such intangible qualities by means of images, colors and shapes.
Visual identity graphic designers work together with brand stakeholders to design logos, color palettes, typography and image libraries that represent the personality of the brand. Aside from creating regular business cards and company stationary, designers usually come up with visual brand guidelines (style guides) that provide the best practices and examples of visual branding used across different media. These guidelines help ensure the consistency of the brand all through future applications.
2. Marketing and advertising
Graphic design to majority of people represents the designs made for marketing and advertising. Businesses rely on best marketing efforts to influence the decision-making process of their target audience. Effective marketing allows people to engage based on their needs, wants, awareness and satisfaction of a product, service or brand. Since visual content is more engaging to people, graphic design helps businesses/organizations communicate and promote themselves in a more effective way.
Marketing designers work together with business owners, managers, directors and marketing professionals to come up with assets for marketing strategies. Some work as freelancers while others work as part of an in-house team or creative group. Other designers specialize in a particular type of media like magazine ads and vehicle wraps or create a wide variety of collateral used for print and digital. They used to be focused on print but their role has developed to add more digital assets to be used particularly for content marketing.
3. User interface
User interface or UI is the way users interact with a device or an app. UI design is the process of designing interfaces to make them simple to use and give great user-friendly experience.
A UI comes with everything a user interacts with – like keyboard, mouse and screen. However, in terms of graphic design, UI design’s focus is on a user’s visual experience and the design of graphic elements, such as buttons, menus and micro-interactions, among others. It is the job of a UI designer to create a balance between aesthetics and technical functionality.
UI designers work on mobile apps, desktop apps, web pages and games. They work hand in hand with user experience (UX) designers, designers (who know how the app works), as well as UI developers – who write the code so it could work.
4. Publication
Publications that come in long-form pieces communicate with viewers by means of public distribution. They used to be in print medium like books, magazines, newspapers and catalogs, but there has been a significant increase in digital publishing in the last decades.
Graphic designers who specialize in publications coordinate with publishers and editors to make layouts that have carefully chosen typography and accompanying artwork, such as graphics, illustrations and photography. Publication designers may either work as a freelancer, creative agency member or part of a publishing company.
