Design is Thinking made Visual

Saul Bass, award-winning graphic designer for his movie posters and motion picture title sequences, once said that, “Design is Thinking made Visual”. At the start of my PCC, graphic design was one of the courses I focused on as social media was becoming such a need. It was during that time I found that graphic design was much more than just plastering a title on the page with colorful graphics and random typefaces. There are steps to creating an effective and attractive graphic design that’ll take your graphics to more than just passerby’s glancing at it, to really looking at it.

The first is knowing the hierarchy in creating your designs, which will bring in the viewer to your design. The first is Attract, this design that you create is the element that will bring in your viewer to the graphic. The second is Intrigue, this is where your graphic displays an area that sparks interest, which then leads to the third one. The third is the message or content of the output, which is the most important part of creating your graphic.

In light of that, in order to make your graphic not just attractive but effective, you’ll need to ask yourself who is your target audience is and what they want, after identifying 1-3 emotional triggers that appeal to your target audience, like understanding what they need, letting your designs bleed through the page with motive, specifying the colors, maybe including real images. Structuring your layout in a clean manner that is easy to digest by the viewer, or even making your graphic tell a story by creating it in a way for your audience’s eyes to follow in a flow. Then lastly, thinking about the graphics layout, color, typography psychology, shape psychology and even imagery. Keeping these questions in mind as you start creating your graphic makes the creative decision much simpler.

With all these in mind we as creatives can get carried away too, so finding the right balance of micro and macro white spaces is important to help you keep your designs easy on the eyes and not too cluttered. So try these steps or assess the next posters you come across. Get creative, get inspired and learn from them.