What graphic design work do you prefer doing the most?

Nor is it graphic design.

Road signs donā€™t design themselves.

This is true, and I believe this is called environmental design, a specialized area of graphic design

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Right. EGD is a disparate discipline.

Product labeling (safety, regulatory, etc.), instruction sheets, specifications, and the like are currently at the core of my consulting business, mostly because their design and execution are what my primary client gets from me. While the environment is profusely Engineering oriented, I regard my output as ā€œmarketing.ā€ Iā€™d say anything that is positioned to contribute to, or influence a consumerā€™s perception of, and experience with a brand, business, or product is indeed an element of Marketing. If you buy a product that requires assembly and/or installation and the instructions are confusing or cause you to damage the item, it could easily ruin your perception of a perfectly credible product and the company that makes it. In that sense, effective design of customer-facing technical materials could be considered ā€œpreventiveā€ marketing.

Environmental graphic design, or now sometimes called Experiential Graphic Design for a number of reasons, is just about all I do.
There is definitely a graphic design element to it that ties in with architecture and/or show biz. Itā€™s one of the more lucrative branches of GD too if you can break into it. A lot of GD students have trouble with it due to its 3D spacial requirements and needing to have the skills to think literally outside the box.

Educational exhibits might fall outside marketing too if maybe for one of the National Parks or private museum collections, but most of the science museums and aquariums all plug a sponsor of the exhibit in some way. Whether it is Disney or NASA, the plug is there somewhere. Rightly so, I might add. Todayā€™s fun is brought to you by Toy Story, and you might learn something too! If they have money to educate kids, Iā€™m all for it.

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In this sentence, you simultaneously agreed with DocPixel who said it was a specialized area of graphic design, then disagreed with your own statement by saying itā€™s disparate from graphic design.

Not all environmental design is graphic design, of course, but if road signage is a subset of environmental design (which I have no opinion about), the design of those signs is still most definitely graphic design.

Someone designed the layouts, chose the colors, chose the typefaces, chose the wording, decided dimensions and made the hundreds of other design decisions contained in the standards manuals. Designing signage systems like this is not all that different from designing corporate branding standards.

Iā€™ve designed signage standards for government agencies. Instead of road signs, however, they were primarily for identifying and communicating regulations associated with public access to western state wildlife and habitat management areas. There were hundreds of graphic design decisions made during the course of this large-scale project, and it was as much graphic design as anything Iā€™ve ever done.

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Marketing collateral but Iā€™ll do almost anything as long itā€™s not code.

If you are saying that graphic design intersects with marketing and is not a subset of marketing, then I agree.

The problem can work both ways too. You can get good marketers that are bad at graphic design interfering with the process, and you can get good graphic designers making bad marketing decisions without the benefit of market research and analysis.

I was going to answer this, but Printdriver, Just-B and Hotbutton answered it first, and did it better.

I agree. Many designers, newer ones especially, are under the impression that their job is to be creative. And thatā€™s part of it, for sure.

But the larger responsibility is to craft a design that will help the client communicate their message to their customers. And before you can do this effectively, you need to have some idea of marketing research and analysis, what drives shopping behavior, how different cultures/ages etc. respond to specific visual stimuli.

You donā€™t have to know how to do market research. But you have to know that it exists, that you need it, and to go find it.

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Well, now youā€™ve brought up the long tangents I was avoiding. :wink:

People have a tendency to categorize things even when there are huge, blurry, overlapping gray areas between one thing and the next. So I think a lot depends on where one draws those arbitrary lines.

I have a tendency to include most kinds of graphic design in most situations as a subset of marketing because graphic design is typically part of a marketing effort. Not all marketing involves graphic design, but nearly all graphic design is part of a marketing effort (depending on how one defines marketing, I suppose). In those instances where graphic design doesnā€™t involve a marketing effort, it, of course, isnā€™t a subset and doesnā€™t intersect with marketing.

Much the same could be said of communication efforts in general. For example, when copywriting has a marketing slant, itā€™s a subset of marketing. When it has a journalism slant, itā€™s a subset of journalism. In a text book, itā€™s a subset of education. The same could be said of photography, web development, videography, media relations, etc. ā€” when theyā€™re used in a marketing capacity, theyā€™re a subset of marketing. When theyā€™re not, theyā€™re not.

Whether these are subsets or intersections probably isnā€™t that important and might be as much a matter of semantics as actual hierarchy. But to me, when something is part of a marketing effort, it becomes a subset of marketing.

I agree, but I was specifically identifying a problem in my classification of graphic design as a subset of marketing ā€” it tends to place marketers at the top of the organizational pyramid. This shouldnā€™t necessarily be a problem, but many marketers are clueless about graphic design, and they can be incredibly counterproductive when overseeing graphic design efforts (Iā€™ve seen it happen many times). If the situation were reversed, with naive graphic designers being in charge of marketing efforts, an opposite but equally disastrous situation could occur.

I think this problem has much to do with outdated organizational structures in higher education where these subjects are taught.

In many universities, graphic design is included in the fine arts college, and the coursework tends to have a slant that focuses on aesthetics while downplaying its role in the workplace as a function of business operations.

Marketing and advertising are typically included in business colleges, where statistics, data, metrics, numbers, research and strategy tend to dominate. These are certainly critical aspects of marketing, but the coursework downplays (and sometimes derides) the importance of intuition, aesthetics, emotions and various psychological factors that both communication and design graduates know are important.

These siloed educations end up causing problems in the workplace. For example, even in those marketing programs that require a token class or two in design, those classes are usually taught by a member of the marketing/business faculty whose slant is still an MBAā€™s view of the world. The end result being marketing and MBA graduates who know just enough about design to make them overconfident about their expertise in the matter and, consequently, very dangerous when overseeing the efforts of designers and communicators. Similar things could be said about communication and design programs. For example, as far as I know, few design programs require any meaningful business classes.

The end results of this are graduates who see the same the same post-graduate world from radically different points of view. When theyā€™re tossed together into teams at agencies (in-house or otherwise), theyā€™re often at odds with one another and tend to downplay the viewpoints and expertise of each other. Iā€™d have trouble counting the number of times Iā€™ve heard advertising account executives make derisive comments about their design staffs as being oddballs with their heads in the clouds. Likewise, itā€™s probably even more common for graphic designers to complain about the myopic viewpoints and demands of the marketing people they work with.

There are more factors involved than background and education, of course, but I really do have to point to failures in our higher education system for not satisfactorily addressing these problems, at least when theyā€™re not actually exacerbating them.

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Election ballots?

Ours are certainly badly designed.

I remember reading an article in Scientific American, of all places, about how badly American ballots are designed, so I just Googled it and found quite a few articles on the subject. For example:

Scientific American
Slate
Medium Corporation

There are more links, but this is seemingly a huge problem that just isnā€™t being dealt with. The entire year 2000 Bush-Gore US presidential election results, for example, came down to a badly designed ballot problem in Florida that the Supreme Court ended up deciding, for better or worse.

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Oh my, I am so sharing these. Thanks, B.

I love catalogs. Clients create chaos and mayhem and they think Iā€™m a god for sorting it all out.

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Catalogs can be very difficult and frustrating. I admire anyone who enjoys designing them and making them more attractive.

am only allowed to pick one option? :disappointed_relieved::persevere:

By definition, only one can be most preferable.

I just serendipitously stumbled across a talk given by Michael Bierut of Pentagram. In the talk, among other design subjects, he discusses the very thing mentioned above at about 02:50, so I thought Iā€™d share.