Graphic Design is Emotional Design
Although to work in the digital age means you must design with interactive software, graphic design still revolves around age-old principles. It’s crucial that you strike the right chord with users from their first glance—hence graphic design’s correspondence with emotional design. As a graphic designer, then, you should have a firm understanding of color theory and how vital the right choice of color scheme is. Color choices must reflect not only the organization (e.g., blue suits banking) but also users’ expectations (e.g., red for alerts; green for notifications to proceed). You should design with an eye for how elements match the tone (e.g., sans-serif fonts for excitement or happiness). You also need to design for the overall effect, and note how you shape users’ emotions as you guide them from, for instance, a landing page to a call to action. Often, graphic designers are involved in motion design for smaller screens. They will carefully monitor how their works’ aesthetics match their users’ expectations. They can enhance their designs’ usability in a flowing, seamless experience by anticipating the users’ needs and mindsets. With user psychology in mind, it’s important to stay focused on some especially weighty graphic design considerations, namely these:
