Common Design Practices in the Industry
By Mehreen Masood
Design Practices
The Design Practices mentioned below are defined by AIGA The Professional Association For Design. These are the most commonly practiced branches of Design within the Pakistani Design Industry.
1. Advertising design
Attracts attention and makes a compelling marketing pitch to audience desire for products or services. Other persuasive advertising such as political or social messages encourages audiences to adopt an opinion or change behavior.
2. Brand design
Authentically reflects how a business or organization wants to be perceived by people. Brand is expressed through a graphic identity system, but also includes the products and services the organization offers and the quality and value of relationships it establishes with people over time.
3. Design Research
Studies how people encounter, use, and experience communication, products, spaces, and services. In contrast to market research which relies on what people say in surveys and interviews and requires statistically significant results design research guides design decisions through firsthand observation of what people actually do. Increasingly, technology also allows design researchers to examine the faces, places, and traces of user behavior in the analysis of digital data. Practice focused research addresses how design is planned, produced, and distributed.
4. User Experience Design
Addresses the entire user journey in acquiring and using information, products, and/or services. A multidisciplinary practice, experience design may involve psychologists, anthropologists, computer programmers, and business experts, as well as communication, product, and architectural designers. A business, for example, may be concerned about bridging the customer online and in store experiences, while a museum may think in terms of the casual visitor versus member experiences.
5. Game Design
Combines computer programming, storytelling, and the visualization of challenge or rules driven digital experiences. Games serve both entertainment and educational purposes. Some games involve simulations of potential social, economic, or physical scenarios for study.
6. Interaction Design
Creates the conditions for interaction between people and products. Products may be digital and/or physical. Interaction designers work in creating positive relationships among people s perceptions of product affordances, actual behavior of the product s system, and people s achievement of objectives.
7. Interface Design
Connects the actions of the user to the technological system behavior of computers, appliances, and other electronic devices. Interfaces may be visual, voice activated, gestural, or motion activated through sensors, sometimes without user awareness. Icons are a graphical user interface. Pinching to re size photographs on a smartphone is a gestural/touch interface. The efficiency and pleasure of use are of primary importance to interface designers
8. Package Design
Protects, stores, and identifies products. Packaging is a primary means for communicating a brand and featuring the qualities of the product. The practice may involve both the structural aspects of packaging, as well as the image and text that explain the product and its use. Packaging can facilitate a marketing display strategy (for example, how stacked items appear on store shelves) or a service strategy (for example, how packaging supports self delivery).
9. Service Design
Plans and organizes people, communication, and the physical and digital components of a service to improve the interaction between a service provider and customers. Service design examines the internal infrastructure of the service provider s operations, as well as the customer experience. Increasingly, self service plays a role in business and government.
10. Software Design
Plans and creates digital applications that support specific user goals or tasks. Software design involves the totality of the digital product or service to be built by engineers and computer scientists, as well as the "look and feel" of the interaction between the user and the technological system. This work is sometimes called "Product Design" in the software industry. Platform Design focuses on the underlying systems on which software products can be built. A number of technology companies open their platforms to third party developers of software applications.
11. Visual Design
Creates the "look and feel" of screen displays in the design of websites and software applications. These designers are responsible for the development and consistent implementation of visual concepts throughout the users web or software experience.
12. Web Design
Creates and maintains websites images, text, videos, and animation using programming code. Web designers are responsible for information architecture the organization, navigation structure, and labeling of content used by the site to respond to user interaction.
Meet the Team
Mehreen Masood
Senior Student, LUMS
