The realm of graphic designers are pages of books, newspapers and magazines, websites and advertisements, interactive computer programs, and the like. Graphic designers create fonts, magazine page layouts, advertising modules, and storefront designs.
The popular belief is that web design is a long way off from printing, which is considered to be the apex of the profession. Yet such masters’ websites strike a sharp contrast compared to home pages of rank-and-file users.
Turning sites from a mere set of texts and photos into a work of design art requires mastering special programming languages such as Perl, JavaScript, php, and others, using Photoshop, making sense of text encodings, learning markup languages (HTML and XML), as well as graphics presentation methods (vector and bit map formats).
In designing a website or book, the designer uses photos, text, or graphics made by other people. This very kind of work distribution ensures the best result: work is performed with top-quality material. The designer must not be a photographer or text author. The designer must not even have a detailed knowledge of HTML or computer layout techniques. It’s a different thing that attempting design without the command of such a multifunctional tool as the PC is meaningless at the time of mass computerization. To create a thing of beauty using a computer, one must know how to do it. Moreover, modern computer software provides a wealth of new opportunities. Without familiarity with these capabilities, one cannot produce a competitive product.
Naturally, the level of the designer’s computer literary by far exceeds that of a rank-and-file user. The designer is an artist. Yet there is a solid bond between the careers of an artist and computer wiz: designer solutions for print materials, advertisements, and the web are created using special software.