Breaking Down the 7 Key Steps of the Graphic Design Process

Graphic design process is a lot more than just having eye pleasing visuals. It is a rigmarole on creativity, the formulation of plans and then solving the procedural problems in order to achieve an effective visual communication tool. Both your logo design, website design or your marketing campaign strategies will follow some graphic design steps for proper and appealing outcome. In this post, we shall take our time to explain to you seven critical stages in the graphic design process that any professional graphic designer goes through to come up with a quality design.

Outline of the Article

1. Introduction
2. Step 1: Defining the Project Brief

Understanding Client’s Needs

Key Components of a Design Brief

3. Step 2: Research and Discovery

Market Research

Competitor Analysis

Audience Understanding

4. Step 3: Brainstorming and Concept Development

Idea Generation

Sketching Initial Concepts

5.Step 4: Creating a Rough Draft

Wireframes and Layouts

Drafting with Software

6. Step 5: Design Development and Refinement

Fine-tuning the Design

Getting Feedback

7. Step 6: Client Review and Feedback

Presenting Designs to Clients

Managing Feedback and Revisions

8. Step 7: Final Delivery and Launch

Preparing the Final Files

Launching the Design into the Market

9. The Importance of Flexibility in the Design Process
10. Common Pitfalls in the Graphic Design Process
11. How to Communicate Effectively with Your Client
12. Why Iteration is Key in Graphic Design
13. Conclusion

Introduction

Graphic design process basically is the ability to portray information with the help of graphics where elements have to be combined in the right manner. But of course, if you’ve ever drawn something from scratch, you will understand that it’s not as simple as it looks. Designing a professional graphic design is not a mere act of opening design software and start working on creating a masterpiece. The author presents procedures that guarantee each design achieves its goal and makes an impact to the target group. Here are the seven steps to the process of designing for graphics to provide an understanding of the necessary action that go into transforming these ideas into actuality.

Step 1: Defining the Project Brief

The initial task when it comes to graphic design process is essentially to set out the goals of the project, in what can be referred to as the project brief. This step may be often strategic for the entire project, and therefore, should be done to perfection for the best results.

Understanding Client’s Needs

Graphic design process anything, before speaking of colors, or fonts, or layout, the designer must first know what both the client and the product wants. This entails collection of information concerning the project’s objectives, target users, intended goals and expected achievements. In most cases the clients may not even be clearly aware of what they need until there is someone to ask them the right questions.

 Key Components of a Design Brief

A good design brief should include the following:A good design brief should include the following:

 Project scope: Now the question is what exactly has to be designed?

 Objectives: What is the purpose of design overall?

 Target audience: For whom is the design?

 Budget and timeline: Is there anything that would limit me in some ways?

Step 2: Research and Discovery:

From the above brief, you add onto it and that takes you to the **research and discovery** section. It assists designers as they get to discover more about the context of the project, the scope of the industry, and the intended receivers.

Market Research

In this manner, how and what you want your new sofa, bed, wardrobe or breakfast nook to look like can be well informed by how they are made and the current trends in design today. This can be especially useful to discover what is effective from the perspective of visual presentation and what is not.

Competitor Analysis

It is necessary to observe what others are doing in the research of competitors is part of the research. It assists in knowing areas in the market that remain uncovered or areas that the client can set himself apart viscerally.

Audience Understanding

Graphic design process can always serve different purposes and touching on the need to understand your audience is very important when designing. Are you creating for the young adults? Professionals? Families? Being aware of who is going to view the design radically alters the kind of design that one is going to create.

Step 3: Ideas Generation and Conceptualization

Having your research in front of you, it is high time to begin **idea generation or concept formulation**. This is where creativity comes into the picture.

Idea Generation

Begin with the generation of ideas in which you can write down all the possibilities of ideas at first glance absurd. But how many items are, thus, placed on sale initially still matters more than the quality of the items offered. This means that the more you have available concepts and ideas the more likely you are to realize a particular concept that is good.

Sketching Initial Concepts

After you have a list of a few ideas, begin creating somewhat more crude concepts. These can be as simple as a few hasty sketches with pencil as well as even fundamental digital work sketches. The aim is to see how your ideas will look like when implemented or can be implemented in real life.

Step 4: Creating a Rough Draft

Following brainstorming you proceed to the next step or this process which is the **rough draft**. Ideas that you have at first are here starting to become more concrete.

Wireframes and Layouts

Specifically, in the case of more complex design solutions, such as website or application design, the wireframes are the perfect tools for the preliminary analysis of the structure and placement of the elements without getting lost in the nuances, such as color and typography. Specifically, for simple regions such as logos, a conceptual sketch can be less descriptive than rough form findings.

Drafting with Software

When you are satisfied with the sketches and wireframes, you can proceed to the graphical representation of your plans on graphic software such as Illustrator, Photoshop or Figma among others. This is where your ‘works in progress’ turn more into refined pieces of writing.

Step 5: Design Development and Refinement

The next step is polishing and building on the draft that is just created in order to have a final result. This step revolves around refining your concepts or ideas which you have come up with initially.

Fine-tuning the Design

This is where you come up with details. While resizing some letters and changing the color or the position on the page, the ultimate idea as for every kind of design is really simple and that is to make it as visually appealing as possible.

Getting Feedback

Here it is important to receive the approval of the client or other designers if any were involved in the project. Evaluating someone else’s work is always different from evaluating your own work and this might mean that a fresh set of eyes will detect problems that you might have overlooked during the drafting process.

Step 6: Client Review and Feedback

After you have fine tuned the design you then proceed to the **clients review**. As you noticed it is very important to present your design in a manner that interferes with constructive criticism.

Presenting Designs to Clients

When presenting designs, it is important that the steps followed in producing the designs are explained to the clients. Give reasons for the specific decisions made during the design process and how the decisions provided meets the objectives from the brief.

Managing Feedback and Revisions

This is true because clients will always make some requests or change which is perfectly acceptable. The most important principle is to be ready to receive criticism and use it for enhancement of the design. The only caution with this is to remember to always fulfill the client’s directives as well as incorporating your judgment.

Step 7: Final Delivery and Launch

After some modifications you are now set for **final delivery **and **launch**.

Preparing the Final Files

After the client has agreed on the design, finalize the files in each of the suitable formats. This could be as simple as exporting logos in different formats (PNG, JPG, SVG etc. ) or making sure that web design is set for development.

Bringing the Design in to the Market

Graphic design process last one of them is to make sure that the design is correctly implemented across all the organization’s units and processes. In print designs it may require the interaction with a printer while in digital designs it may involve engaging with developers in order to confirm that all functions correctly.

Flexibility as an Aspect in Design Process

Graphic design process above sequences depict that no design process is ever 100 percent linear. It is useful here, to use the step-wise approach flexibly, especially as more information is collected in the process or feedback is received from clients. I think that flexibility should be the keynote to supply idea, in order to design effectively.

Getting to the Identity – Common Pitfalls in the Graphic Design Process

Despite the use of the systematic approach it is possible to stumble upon some common mistakes. These are for instance failing to conduct research, inadequate communication with the client or inadequate time spend for revisions. Mentioned above are some of the challenges that you can learn and avoid them.

Effective Communication Strategies with Your Client

This implies that the process of communication is a critical element in the whole graphic design process. It is also important to involve the client at each step of the process especially when submitting working papers or seeking his or her input. That is why communication, or lack thereof, can be such a huge timesaver or time waster at the same time.

Why it iteration is good in Graphic design

Graphic design process **reiterative** in the most basic and profound senses of that term. It is for this reason that most times a design will have some form of imperfection on its first implementation. Rereading and editing your work will make you discover some ways that you could improve the work that you could not discover when creating the work.

 Conclusion

Graphic design process can be defined as a complex procedure of creating more than just visual appearance of an object that is still rather a systematic sequence of actions that demand not only imagination but also critical thinking and efficient collaboration. Every stage of the process starting from the definition of the brief and ending in the delivery contributes a lot to the success of the given project. Adhering to these seven steps of the process means that you will create and deliver better and more effective designs that will suit the needs of your client as well as your own requirements.

FAQs

1. Which stage of the Graphic design process seems to be the most vital to a graphic designer?

The most critical of them all is the identification of the project brief since it will act as a guide to the rest of the project.

2. It also made me wonder how long does a typical graphic design project take?

That, of course, depends on the specifics of the issue but generally the design of one or another project takes several days to several weeks for a standard design project.

3. Is it possible for a design brief to shift during the course of the process?

Of course, it can be done, if the brief is mutable when new information becomes available and is processed.

where the situation is significantly different, these changes should be very well communicated.

4. That is a question that will be answered as we go through the article, which outlines the most often used tools employed by the graphic designers.

That includes Adobe Creative Suite of products including Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, Figma, Sketch among others. These tools assist the designers to realise their creativity in the best manner possible.