What is The Connection Between UX and Graphic Design

A successful marketing campaign doesn’t just direct potential customers to your site; it needs to prompt people to take the desired action once they’re there. Whether it’s a purchase, subscription, or something else, your campaign isn’t successful until they’ve followed through.

This is where your marketing graphic design and UX (user experience) seal the deal. Together, your UX and graphic design for your website should work in harmony to create an intriguing, satisfying, and effective site that convinces your customers to take action. While they work toward similar goals, good marketing graphic design and UX require different skills.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through where marketing graphic design and UX diverge, as well as how they intersect again in the final product.

What Is UX?

Have you ever bought anything online and been struck by how easy the whole process was? Or alternatively, have you ever tried to buy something only to quit halfway through due to how frustrating it was? Both of these are examples of user experience, or UX, one excellent and one poor.

UX covers the journey a customer takes from point A to point B, from initial interest to final conversion to sale.

Interactions Are Key

For UX, it’s all about how the customer engages with the site. Is the layout clear and legible? Can people tell what they can interact with? Does using the site feel intuitive? Does it feel rewarding to use the site?

These questions and more are all important to developing an effective UX. The web designer has to envision the architecture of the site and develop systems to make the platform as appealing as possible.

Pulls From a Lot of Skill Sets

UX designers have to wear many hats to do their jobs well. It demands thorough user research to help them understand what people want out of the experience, then using that data to sketch out basic wireframes and eventually build prototypes that meet consumers’ needs. These tasks require a depth of design skill, effective data collection, and an understanding of user psychology.

Primarily Concerned With the User

UX prioritizes the person using the platform. What do they want? What do they need?  A UX designer needs to consider every element of the path from first interest to final action, optimizing the experience along the way. A good UX design can be brand agnostic. What matters is how effectively it helps guide people toward the desired action.

What Is Marking Graphic Design?

When it comes to establishing a brand, marketing graphic design is everything. You want something simple but striking and memorable, something aesthetically pleasing that helps set you apart from the pack. A good graphic designer knows how to take a company or service and develop visual elements to encapsulate it. Through the development of illustrations, logos, fonts, and even color palettes, they collaborate with others to create an outward face to represent a brand.

It’s All About the Look

Marketing graphic design guides a user through a site while also adhering to a consistent aesthetic style. It communicates functionality through visual language, making navigation easy and clear. Graphic design also inspires emotions within users, giving them an idea of how the brand feels.

Maybe they choose a bold font and bright color palette to suggest an active and dynamic feel or an elegant script and pastels to give a more peaceful impression. Each graphic design choice informs the user, telling them about the brand and what choices are available to them.

Specializes in the Craft

A graphic designer needs to have a strong visual sense along with a deep creative well to draw from. They typically also need expertise with various design and illustration programs, like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and Procreate. As such, it’s a much more specialized role than that of a UX designer.

Primarily Concerned with the Brand

While marketing graphic design takes user needs into account, it is first and foremost an expression of the brand. In developing it, a graphic designer isn’t just choosing images and colors they think will be pleasing for a user. They are contributing to the image of the brand at large, cementing their identity to the public. Every major consumer-facing company has clear imagery and visual language that represents its brand, along with the qualities associated with it. They’ve achieved such instant brand recognition through exceptional graphic design.

How They Come Together

Building Off Each Other

Your UX and graphic design should work together at every opportunity. If you want to create a sense of peace and calm, you can use soothing colors and a soft font, but pairing that with a busy or harshly geometrical interface creates a sense of conflict.

Similarly, if your UX employs any functionalities that are common throughout the web (an exit button, a next page button, etc), your graphic design should employ any broadly used design conventions to communicate that information and prevent any confusion. When your UX and your graphic design work in harmony, your platform can perform at its best.

Thinking Creatively

UX and graphic design both require creative problem-solving to achieve an end. Both also require a designer to tap into their creative skills—in addition to a strong sense of logic—to develop efficient solutions to the problems they encounter. Their designs need to illuminate the user, providing the information necessary to move onward. If the design doesn’t work, you need to be willing to refine the design or try a completely new tactic until it does.

Creating a Cohesive Experience

UX and graphic design should combine to form the roadmap a user uses to navigate a platform. UX focuses on functionality and making interactions simple and satisfying. It should make the journey from beginning to end seamless, bringing the user along with little to no friction. The graphic design works alongside the UX to keep the platform feeling on-brand and emotionally resonant, as well as communicating important information through a visual medium.

Through clear visual cues, easily parsable instruction and a sleek interface, your site’s graphic design and UX work in tandem to get the user where they need to go.

Consult a team like InnoVision Marketing Group for your website and let the marketing graphic design and UX experts create or update a site for you. Reach out today and see all the ways they can help your business thrive.

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