Graphic Topics

Graphic Info ...

Marketing Hat For Graphic Designers Or Wannabe’s ... Many people think that the quality of any graphic design is determined by how aesthetically pleasing it is: Although making the card look good is important, this couldn't be further from the truth... The only true measure of any design, at least commercially, is "How well does it pull?" By pull we mean what type of response does it elicit? Does it pull in calls, or pull people into the store? In essence, does the design accomplish what it set out to do? From this fact it is not a reach to come to the conclusion that the merit of a graphic designer is based on the performance of his or her designs...

The great practical difference between the word, written or spoken, and the visual image is that we cannot read the former unless we have been initiated into the mystery of language, whereas visual images can be made intelligible to all men who have eyes.... The spiritual difference between the written word and the visual image is equally great. Precise though a word is, evocative though it be, the actual machinery of visual perception is not engaged. All that takes place, takes place now within the mind; the retina and the neurons sleep; we are in a world which has been created by old, long-stored stimuli; the accidents of energy exterior to ourselves have been totally excluded from it. Even the spoken word is further from this spiritual purity than the word upon the page, for sounds have at least a sensual immediacy of a sort, but the written word is only the ghost of a sound. We have entered now into a realm not of images but of substitutes.
—Derek Clifford. “The Call of the Image,” Art and Understanding, New York Graphic Society (1968)