The art of graphic communication

The art of being an effective graphic communicator is to be able to have your heart, head and hand working simultaneously together. Your heart is involved with expressing emotion along with engaging the audience, whereas your head is the tool behind the ideas and strategy and finally your hand is the technique behind your work.

 The process of design has to be appropriate for the given subject so that the message can be communicated effectively. Such as when designing for an invitation, you have to persuade, invite and engage and so setting up a relationship. However designing for informative means you need to be able to inform, educate and allow your information to be understood from complex data to simple concepts. It is also important to use consistent graphic language for example colour, typeface and layout as these will all help with making the information easier to read, understand and recognise.

 Information design can be anything from road signs, timetables, menus, instruction manuals to brochures. My recent visit to Cadburys world for product research is an example of how information design is in constant demand for our everyday movements. From the moment I left the house to start the journey, I needed to follow road signs to the train station, followed by looking at a timetable and platform number at the station. I then followed a map on foot, where I occasionally also checked the road signs to keep on track.

All of these different forms of information design are completely different, for example a road sign needs as little detail as possible as drivers will only have a small amount of time to take in the information as they go past. However if too many road signs are situated in one place, this can also cause an overload of information, regardless of how simple the individual signs are. Whereas a map designed for walkers will have a lot of detail including all the street names and locations in which you can plan your exact route.

Overload of signs

Another type of graphic communication is expressive graphics in which is involved in developing briefs, values and communicating messages. For example; motion graphics uses trade marks to create the story for a film.