Tuesday, June 10, 2008

The difference between web design and graphic design


Design is a temporary human creation. It will remind change and to be re design at the times passing by. Design refer to designer products in creative and art works. There are two design related works fluorishing in this age of internet, and people often think that it was the same, those are web design and graphic design.

I wrote this because of the miss interpretation from my friend, he said that he had a friend who works as a web design, but that man cannot works on a php language, he just can do lay-out the page. Then I said, your friend is not a web designer, but a graphic designer.

That is just common mistake, because today this two jobs often can be done by one person, as a web designer, and also a graphic designer. Yet this is the same work field, web designer and graphic designer works in the creative media and related works. Lets see it from the contextual keywords, web design means design of a web, and graphic design means design of a graphic. And then, from wikipedia. While web design means = "a process of conceptualization, planning, modeling, and execution of electronic media content delivery via Internet in the form of technologies (such as markup languages) suitable for interpretation and display by a web browser or other web-based graphical user interfaces (GUIs)", while graphic design means = "can refer to a number of artistic and professional disciplines which focus on visual communication and presentation".

So, while web designer is people who create a website (by overall) from the programming language (PHP, C++, and other robotics words that i don’t know what the h*** is it, lol!) the templates, until the implementation and so on, and graphic designer is people who create logos, layout pages, and until the promotional stage. Lets make it simple, web designers need logical thinking more than creative thinking in their job (they use more left brain), and the graphic designers need creative thinking more than logical thinking (they use more right brain) as vice versa. Can web designer works as a graphic designer? Of course yes, if he or she had creative side, and so the same with graphic designer works as a web designer.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well my friend, I'm not totally agree with what you said about web designer is someone who did the overall job. The proper words for those who did that is Web Developer.

But I agree that web designer is have to use more logical concepts as the design will be developed using codes that sometimes is very limited to perform a complex design concepts, which is more easier to do in graphic design with conventional media presentation (printing).

Anonymous said...

Thanks for information. It is eye opener.
We are laymen to AJAX, SEO, Java etc terminologies. So we get confused and presume that all the website features are integrated whereas in reality it takes various knowledge and skills.