Design

Design is often viewed as a more rigorous form of art, or art with a clearly defined purpose.
Designing normally requires a designer to consider the aesthetic, functional, and many other aspects of an object or a process, which usually requires considerable research, thought, modeling, interactive adjustment, and re-design.

Designing methods include areas that focus on:

• Exploring possibilities and constraints by focusing critical thinking skills to research and define problem spaces for existing products or services—or the creation of new categories; like brainstorming for ideas.
• Redefining the specifications of design solutions which can lead to better guidelines for traditional design activities (graphic, industrial, architectural, etc.)
• Managing the process of exploring, defining, creating artifacts continually over time.
• Prototyping possible scenarios, or solutions that incrementally or significantly improve the inherited situation.
• Trend spotting; understanding the trend process.

The design process includes a series of steps followed by designers. Depending on the product or service, some of these stages may be irrelevant, ignored in real-world situations in order to save time, reduce cost, or because they may be redundant in the situation.

Typical stages of the design process include:

• Pre-production design
  • Design brief - a statement of design goals.
  • Analysis - analysis of current design goals.
  • Research - investigating similar design solutions in the field or related topics.
  • Specification - specifying requirements of a design solution.
  • Problem solving - conceptualizing and documenting design solutions.
  • Presentation - presenting design solutions.
• Design during production
  • Development - continuation and improvement of a designed solution.
  • Testing - in-situ testing a designed solution.
• Post-production design feedback for future designs.
  • Implementation - introducing the designed solution into the environment.
  • Evaluation and conclusion - summary of process and results, including constructive criticism and suggestions for future improvements.
• Redesign - any or all stages in the design process repeated (with corrections made) at any time before, during, or after production.

An Illustration is a visualization such as a drawing, painting, photograph or other work of art that stresses subject more than form. The aim of an illustration is to elucidate or decorate a story, poem or piece of textual information (such as a newspaper article), traditionally by providing a visual representation of something described in the text.

Illustration

Illustrations can be used to display a wide range of subject matter and serve a variety of functions:

• Giving faces to characters in a story.
• Displaying a number of examples of an item described in an academic textbook.
• Visualizing step-wise sets of instructions in a technical manual.
• Communicating subtle thematic tone in a narrative.
• Linking brands to the ideas of human expression, individuality and creativity.
• Inspiring the viewer to feel emotion in such a way as to expand on the linguistic aspects of the narrative.