What Graphic Design is

5 min readNov 20, 2020

What is the difference between graphic artists and graphic designers?
Do you think we have our professional identity nowadays?
What kind of education is graphic design?
How would you define the graphic design and pure design?
What is a graphic design student’s career path after they graduated from school?
Do we need to critique?
Will design criticism deviate our idea from studio practice to more like writing practice?
Where is our direction?

After reading The Graphic Design Reader, I have a lot of questions.

I am confused about the identity of a graphic design student. When I tell my friend I did graphic design, my friend feels that I have a lot of opportunities after I graduate. However, the route of graphic design students is undefined. graphic design students don’t like science students or business students, we don’t have a clear career path of where we go. Most science students choose to go to med school after graduation and most business students already get a job in their senior year.

Directionless(Bottom Right) Path to Nowhere(Bottom Left) Flight Ticket(Top)

Being a graphic design student does have a lot of opportunities to establish their own career. We can not deny that studying graphic design is easy to get a job compared to studying other fine art majors. I choose graphic design because it is a practical subject for me.

I made some initial posters based on my personal feeling. I feel directionless and depicts studying graphic design as a one-way trip.

Then, I have the first group meeting with Yi, Lucy, and Ek. I am glad to hear what my classmates thought of the article, most importantly what they think about graphic design. We have a great conversation about our current problems. Directionless and possibilities are our keywords. We always want to explore more, but at the same time, the focus is a blur. We start to assign each person a main color to play around with.

I choose red and experiments with installation in my room.

Then, we have our second meeting on Zoom. I jump even further from the graphic design loop. Using different compositions, I start to explore the relationship between me and graphic design.

The path of nowhere truly gives us a lot of uncertainty. At the same time, we did have a lot of choices. We can choose to enter a known studio, create our own studio, even go to a company. I choose to do a collage. There are a lot of questions that we could not answer. We have a lot of pressure. Based on that idea, I want to create something relaxable. I take tourism in the world of graphic design. I try to jump out of the inside view and try to be an outside person to see the problem.

Graphic design is still puzzled to me. I am not even sure would be my future career or I could live on this. However, I am sure that there are a lot of possibilities to explore and experiment. In order to put all of our responses in one video, we choose to do different layers by persons. It creates a lot of exciting moments when we reorganize our elements. It leads the audience to enter our inner world through the screen. This video is the visual integration of our mind and oscillates between now and the future.