What is Visual Design And Why It is Important

Jan 05, 2023 | By Aishna Pathak

What is Visual Design?

Remember in school when those colorful books that were full of pictures and illustrations automatically attracted us more than the generic black and white books? Well, Visual Design works in the same way. Graphics are much easier to understand and can be easily remembered than words. With the creative usage of illustrations, photography, typography, space, layouts, and color visual design is created for an enhanced user interface.

Visual Design is often considered as another term for User Interface design. It is a hybrid of UI design and graphic design but has its own different place in the world of digital design. It is more about what people see on screen than how things on-screen work. It helps to capture the audience’s attention towards the brand through presenting visual aesthetics which requires exceptional visual messaging and communication skills to deliver the ideas to the viewers and listeners in such a way that it is understood and liked by them. It is about explaining the work, the idea behind the design, the concept, and the decisions.

How Visual Design Useful in Your Business

Visual designing is Just like colorful books attract kids in quite an easier way, Visual design brings the viewers close to the brand and creates interest and trust toward a brand.

Tools a Visual Designer and UI Designer Must Know

Google Fonts

It has more than 800 types of fonts to choose from. These fonts are open source and can be used commercially. You can upload an image and find the best font to suit your design or project. Google fonts help in making the web more beautiful, fast, and open through great typography.

Template Monster

It has the biggest number of HTML templates, Wordpress, and eCommerce themes, web graphics, and elements online for all the popular designing apps and websites like Joomla, WooCommerce, Shopify, etc. One can even purchase the themes and templates and do customizations on them as per the needs. Template Monster provides website templates for Content Management System (CMS) platforms, website builders also.

Weld

Weld is an online tool for creating interactive web content without coding. You can Draw, drag, and drop until it looks the way you want. You can add interactivity and animations and publish it as your own existing website as a new website, or as a mobile app- all of it just with a single click.

Camtasia

This app is a software suite lets you create creative video tutorials and presentations directly via screencast, or via a direct recording plug-in to Microsoft Powerpoint. It is the best all-in-one screen recorder and video editor. You can get started with the basics you or you can learn from the complete list of tutorials.

Loom

The loom is an easy and free screen recorder for Mac, Windows, and Chromebooks. It is an absolutely free app and has no limit on video length. It allows you to screencast directly using your computer’s camera, screen, and audio. Loom makes it easy for you to onboarding new employees, troubleshooting customer issues, and code reviews.

FreePik

Freepik is known by usually all of the designers. This tool can be used for professional as well as educational work. It offers free illustrations, PSDs, icons, and photos. Freepik offers free as well as paid services. If you want premium graphics with all the files then you have to purchase a monthly subscription of Freepik.

The Noun Project

The Noun Project has the most diverse collection of icons ever. You can download a million royalty-free icons for a minimal amount of fees. It is a website where dozens of aggregates and catalogs of symbols are uploaded by graphic designers around the world. They are trying to build a visual language that anyone can use and understand.

Venngage

Venngage is a platform where you can customize your infographics with thousands of icons, pictograms, and illustrations available. There is twelve chart size available into which you can directly import your data from the spreadsheet. It is an easy to use website where most design-inept can create stylish content for websites, presentations, ads, social media use, and many more.

Thinglink

This tool helps in creating interactive visual content in the form of photographs, videos, and 360 content. ThingLink is a free and user-friendly digital tool that provides users with the ability to turn any image into an interactive graphic. You can also create multiple hot spots on specific parts of an image and turn that image into a multimedia launcher.

Behance

Behance provides a platform to showcase creative work and to find inspiration and ideas from designers across the world. It is more of a social media platform that allows people to showcase their portfolios of virtual work and discover creative work or designers.

Pixabay

Pixabay is an international, copyleft, and free-to-use website for sharing photos, illustrations, vector graphics and film footage. It is the most famous website to have stock photos and a collection of videos too. You just need to find your perfect free image or video to download and use for anything.

ISO Republic

ISO Republic provides the best high-resolution images & videos for downloading- all free for personal and commercial use. It provides thousands of licensed images that are of high resolution for all your Visual Design projects.

Palet Tab

This is the most interesting tool when it comes to a pallet. It has a large number of pallets and fonts to choose from and with every new tab, a new pallet is presented. Pallet Tab is a browser extension that uses Google fonts and amazing ColourLovers palettes every time you hit the new tab button.

Top Skills You Need to be a Visual Designer In 2020

What visual designer professionally deals with- Visual designers do not work for print but still need to have enough knowledge and understanding of graphic design, identity design, and branding.

They must know the art of multitasking and time management.

Must know typography, layout, and all the required and vital tools of visual designing.

It demands some understanding and experience with transitions, animation, motion design, and dynamic interaction.

Visual, written, and verbal communication skills should be exceptional when it comes to delivering messages from your mind to the mind of viewers, readers, or listeners.

Creativity which is a vital part of all the marketing work, Visual Designers need to be exceptionally good at it. They should be full of ideas for any type of work that could come up.

Visual designers should be very organized, must have an eye for details and precision, and should be punctual with meeting the deadlines.

Principles of Visual Design

"So, here it comes what is the visual design and the principles of visual designing"

 

  • Shapes, points, and lines

Shapes, lines, and points are the most basic and versatile of the principles of visual designing. You can create almost anything with these figures from the most complex graphics to the easy descriptive illustrations. The proper placements and alignments of these shapes, lines, and dots are necessary to create perfect visual aesthetics.

 

  • Typography

Content of your website is very important because it gives all the information about your business or services but the content's typography is more important than that because it attracts customers to read your content. Typography is a technical arrangement of letters in a way that makes it more appealing for the viewers.
 

  • Contrast and balance

The color and graphical balance are important while creating a visual design. The perfect design requires a balance in the elements and their contrast to each other so that it creates visually appealing designs with the more important things highlighted and the rest in light contrast. There should be a rhythm in your designs.
 

  • Colour

Colour is a vital element or principle of visual designing where they have to be carefully chosen according to the moods and themes of your business. Colors attract people the most and the right balance and right color palette do half the work for you. The color palette is chosen according to the types of viewers, like bold colors are chosen for adults while bright and multiple colors are chosen when viewers are kids.
 

  • Space

Space is the most basic principle which has to take care of in visual designing. There is space that is to be filled with elements and alphabets and there is space between the elements and letters which has to be in the right proportion to avoid making your design look scattered and messy.
 

  • Alignments and grid

Grid is invisible but it can be seen when there is the long paragraph written. The elements and the content should be arranged in the grid format to avoid giving a messy appearance but if the designers are purposely giving that scattered designing, they should still take care of the alignment of it so that it doesn’t look untidy.
 

  • Scale

There are some letters or elements that are more important than the rest of them, the scale is the principles that say that those letters or elements should be in contrast to others by using contrast, balance, and typography. The scale is using the right and suitable size for the elements depending upon their importance.
 

  • Framing

Just like photography, framing is the principle that is important in visual designing as well. It brings the important elements in a frame and highlights them to grab the attention of the people. It helps in delivering your idea better and increases the impact of it.
 

  • Texture

When we touch an object we can feel the design, softness, roughness, color, etc. of it which attracts us toward it. The principle of texture or pattern designing is optional but definitely increases the impact of your design on people. It gives people the virtual experience of actually touching a design by the use of creating texture and pattern visuals.