“Honey, I shrunk the desktop!”

Graphic design is all about visual communication. Visual Communication is all about exactly that, communicating a visual message for ourselves, or our clients. We, as designers, are charged with presenting the client’s message in a unique, creative and visually pleasing way. Grab their attention and keep it! In a relatively short period of time, we’ve gone from designing for ink-on-paper media to the transparent computer screen. Now, it seems we must re-think our design elements and principles again, to adjust to The Incredible Shrinking Screen.

The office walls have been knocked down and business, learning and even playing games has become mobile. Our audience is more frequently leaving their laptop at home and surfing the web, emailing, tweeting and downloading books and articles to their kindle.

Graphic designers must now consider this new medium when laying out a piece. Our message must be presented in a clear, quick and legible way, like never before.

That font that we spent hours selecting, because it presented just the right theme, is suddenly un-readable.  It looked great on your 17” monitor, but it is awfully difficult to read when viewed on a hand held communication device. The flow of the design was created for a horizontal space and must now be re-adjusted for vertical or square viewing at under 2 inches wide.

It’s not a new phenomenon, designers have historically had to adapt to new media, since we made those first marks on our cave walls. But hoping that this is just a fad will not make the public’s love of their iPhone or Blackberry go away.

What is ultimately most important is presenting the client’s message in clear and visually pleasing way. The best way to handle any new design project is to think seriously about the principles of design and to research the medium to be used. Read up on professional tactics for each medium and be willing to change your design to adapt, or at least to create multiple versions of a design. Just as we have always made versions of ads for full page, down to quarter page and sixteenth page sizes, we have to shrink a version of our designs as they will be seen in the palm of our audience’s hand. Don’t throw out that great idea, just consider tweaking it a bit for a small screen version.

If you’ve faced this design challenge, drop us a line. The Art-Design Village, welcomes your thoughts and stories about the design of graphics for small media and would love to share your anecdotes with other villagers.

Leave us a comment or two and, as always, be sure to register on the home page.

– Le Grand Fromage