✏️Gavin Ambrose - Collected Quotes

"Art direction is a process that guides the creation of the visual elements of a design. An art director harnesses and integrates the various elements within a design to produce a certain look and feel for the resulting artwork so that it contains the required expressions and conveys the appropriate messages." (Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris, "The Fundamentals of Graphic Design", 2009)

"As an art, graphic design creates striking images and layouts to communicate ideas and information to different audiences. The discipline is at the forefront of creative thought, advancing theory on how to communicate effectively through visual media by using a wide range of intellectual tools to establish meaningful connections between different design elements." (Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris, "The Fundamentals of Graphic Design", 2009)

"Branding is a process that allows a company to differentiate itself and its products from its competitors, while also establishing positive links to its customers in order to create and preserve loyalty. Branding is important in competitive markets as it provides a means for consumers to make buying decisions based on their perceptions of the brand; this may include quality, safety, luxury, value or other considerations that are important to the consumer at the moment of purchase." (Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris, "The Fundamentals of Graphic Design", 2009)

"Colour is a crucial part of graphic design today, but it is something that consumers, clients and designers take for granted. Colour can bring a design to life, help to establish hierarchies, highlight key information and add pace and emotion to a design. However, it is a design aspect that is easy to get wrong and causes problems when a job prints incorrectly." (Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris, "The Fundamentals of Graphic Design", 2009)

"Getting from a design idea to a realised project is not always straightforward and may require a considerable amount of prototyping to get things right. Once the design team has a consolidated idea of how to answer a brief, prototyping provides an opportunity for testing some of the proposed solutions without going to the expense of full development." (Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris, "The Fundamentals of Graphic Design", 2009)

"Graphic design is subject to the evolving intellectual and aesthetic trends that influence the work of designers and reflect the attitudes of society at large." (Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris, "The Fundamentals of Graphic Design", 2009)

"Graphic design takes ideas, concepts, text and images and presents them in a visually engaging form through print, electronic or other media. It imposes an order and structure to the content in order to facilitate and ease the communication process, while optimising the likelihood that the message will be received and understood by the target audience. A designer achieves this goal through the conscious manipulation of elements; a design may be philosophical, aesthetic, sensory, emotional or political in nature." (Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris, "The Fundamentals of Graphic Design", 2009)

"Semiotics is the study of signs that offers an explanation of how people extract meaning from words, sounds and pictures. An understanding of semiotics helps a designer to instil work with references that enable them to communicate multiple layers of information to a reader." (Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris, "The Fundamentals of Graphic Design", 2009)

"The grid is a template or guide used for positioning and organising the elements of a design in order to facilitate and ease decision-making. Grids are the bone structure of a layout and serve as a tool to help a designer achieve balance while presenting a potentially large degree of creative possibilities." (Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris, "The Fundamentals of Graphic Design", 2009)

"Typography is the means by which a written idea is given a visual form. It is one of the most influential elements that establishes the character and emotional attributes of a design; the visual form it takes dramatically affects the accessibility of an idea and how a reader reacts towards it." (Gavin Ambrose & Paul Harris, "The Fundamentals of Graphic Design", 2009)