Graphic Design

Everyday graphic design plays a huge role in our lives.  From the morning paper, the billboards you see on the way to work, and the websites your visit during the course of your day.  All those items are there to attract our attention and draw us to a product or service.  This leads us to CRAP; Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.  The four basic elements to graphic design.  Take for example a billboard, the company advertising has very limited time to make their sales pitch.  If that billboard has a whole bunch of nonsense spread all over it the consumer will have no idea what they are looking at.  But, if that billboard follows the four basic principles of CRAP the consumer will be attracted to it.

Print vs. Web.  Both print and the web have the ability to reach out to consumers.  Print gives you the ability to physically have a product in hand.  This works well by sending out mailings to current and potential customers.  One example that comes to mind is the Clipper Magazine.  There is a whole compilation of advertisements that reaches a broad spectrum of consumers through the mail.  How each advertisement in the Clipper is designed affects the ability of the retailer or service provider to effectively reach out to their consumers.  The web has the ability to reach a broader market and the ability to update continually.  Unlike print, the web can constantly roll out updates.  A newspaper for example typically sends out a print edition in the morning, whereas the web version of that newspaper has the ability to report on demand.  News could happen at 4:05pm and be reported by 4:06pm, where if you rely on the print version of that newspaper you won't be reading that until 7:14am the next morning.

Graphic design has other factors that affect the final product.  File formats for instance can affect the look of an image.  If an image is not in the proper format the image will look distorted.  For example, if a photograph is saved as a GIF it will become pixelated and suffer from color loss.