Inside/Outside: From the Basics to the Practice of Design, Second Edition

Graphic Design

“If you work intensely and slowly, things will happen that you would never imagine.”

AARON SISKIND, 1990

The dictionary definition of graphic, “giving a clear and effective picture,” reveals a key function of graphic design: to convert information. As with music, design must set a mood, generate tension, surprise, or calm; it can startle or seduce. But all of these emotional states, and many others, are for the designer a kind of information. Music in a movie tells you what to think or feel about what’s going on. In a sense, design does the same thing—it tells you how to respond to the rest of the message embodied in the graphics. And, again, like music, or like smell, the visual signals shoot straight to the emotions. That is ...