If only I could photograph the reaction of every person that asks me what I do for a living! When I tell them I am a graphic designer, surprisingly, only about 45% of people know what that is. Most people give me a fake smile and nod their heads. They try to hide it but their faces are overflowing with confusion. I can see them searching their brains to try to remember "what does a graphic designer do again?". What is even worse is that most of those people have a very skewed idea of what a designer actually does. I'll get a call from someone who says, "I want a website and I don't care what it looks like but I want it to work!" Or on the other hand some people micromanage the projects to death and tell me that I don't have to think about anything, and that my job is just to make it "look pretty".
To put it as simply as possible, my job as a designer is to communicate. I create the visual elements that represent my clients. What the guy that wants a website doesn't understand is that if it looks terrible then it really doesn't work at all! The information has to be easy to process and understand, it has to be user-friendly.
Because it is often difficult to describe what graphic design is all about and why it is so important I decided to compare it to something that everyone knows about. . . clothing. I have created this fun little animation to help people understand graphic design by comparing it to clothing.
