A look at how the sausage is made! I’ve talked about how you often need three different design programs to create one design project (and that post is here). This post shows what that looks like — with diagrams!
A graphic design is made of components that are layered on top of each other. Each component is made in a different program, and can contain a bunch of objects or images in itself. I’m not talking about the creative process here — this is the technical view of how a design comes together. To demonstrate I’ll use a poster I made recently:
Your design can have three components (but sometimes less): raster images, vector images, and text.
Raster Images
Raster images are pictures made of pixels, like photos. And if it’s made of pixels, the program to use is Photoshop. This is where I made the background for the poster. The tools and features in Photoshop mainly focus on creating visual effects, whereas its text and drawing tools are very limited. The image gets saved and placed as a graphic in another program.
Vector Images
These are graphics that aren’t made of pixels. There’s a sophisticated explanation for it, but I always tell myself they’re made of math. Anyway, Illustrator is the program for making vector graphics. In this example, they’re the candy shape and the fancy letters. Illustrator mostly features tools for drawing and manipulating shapes, and has little in the way of text layout and photo editing functions. The words had letters weaving around each other, and I needed Illustrator to make that effect.
Text (and simple objects)
At some point in the process designers combine all of their graphics together and add text. The program for this is InDesign. Its features are low on visual effects and drawing tools, but heavy on tools that make text look nice and coexist with images. You can conveniently make simple graphics in InDesign, which I’ve done here for the circles. The graphics made in the other two programs get saved as files and then placed in this program, like inserting clipart in Word.
And you’re done! Or not. The actual process is not quite so linear as I’ve laid out here. Designers often jump around, finessing each piece in its respective design program. Also, some projects might not need all three design programs; an ad might just have a photo background and not need Illustrator for vector graphics. But this is generally how a design gets assembled.