Graphic design makes ideas visible. It is a nuanced visual language that conveys concrete ideas by abstract means, combining the art of typography with the skillful rendering of signs, symbols, and images.
Graphic designers vocalize thought, solicit engagement, influence behavior, stage a dialectic, facilitate connection, provoke a response. Students of graphic design learn its formal principles and acquire the skills necessary to engage these principles in practice. They learn to look, a faculty of vision; and to see, a faculty of the mind. They learn discernment; to excise the trivial from the significant. And they learn to communicate visually and compellingly in the service of a greater public and, potentially, the greater good.