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The following article is from the Career Guide section of the AIGA website,
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/guide-designersatwork
Educational Design
Educational publishing isn't just textbooks anymore. Traditional materials are now joined by a number of new options. Because children and teenagers grow up with television and computers, they are accustomed to interactive experiences. This, plus the fact that students learn best in different ways--some by eye and some by ear--makes educational publishing an important challenge for design.
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Identity design
Creating the key graphic element that identifies a product or service and separates it from its competitors is a challenging design problem. The identity needs to be clear and memorable. It should be adaptable to extreme changes in scale, from a matchbox to a large illuminated sign. And it must embody the character and quality of what it identifies. This capturing of an intangible is an important feature of identity design, but it is also a subtle talent.
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Magazine design
What makes you pick up a particular magazine? What do you look at first? What keeps you turning the pages? In general, you answers probably involve some combinations of content (text) and design (images, typography, and other graphic elements). Magazine designers ask those same questions for every issue they work on; then they try to imagine the answers of their own particular audience--their slice of the magazine market.
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Television graphics design
Motion graphics, such as program openings or graphic demonstrations within a television program, require the designer to choreograph space and time. Images, narration, movement, sound and music are woven into a multisensory communication.
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Publication systems
Systems design involves considerations of user needs, communication consistency, design processes, production requirements, and economies of scale, including the standardization of sizes. Rather than examining and designing an isolated piece, the designer of a system considers the whole, abstracting its requirements and essential elements to for a kind of game plan for the creation of its parts.
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Package design
Packaging performs many functions: it protects, stores, displays, announces a product's identity, promotes, and sometimes instructs. But today, given increased environmental concern and waste-recycling needs, packaging has come under scrutiny. The functions packaging has traditionally performed remain what is needed to now is environmentally responsive design.
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Film title design
Most people have had the experience of losing themselves in a film but probably haven't given much thought to the transition we go though mentally and emotionally as we move from reality to fantasy. Film titles help to create this transition,. The attention narrow, the "self" slips away, and the film washes over the senses. Film titles set the dramatic stage the tune our emotions to the proper pitch so that we enter into the humor, mystery, or pathos of a film with hardly a blink.
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Information design
How do you get around in an unfamiliar city? What if the language is completely different from English? What kind of guidebook can help you bridge the communication gap? Access Tokyo is a successful travel guide to one of the most complex cities in the world. It is also an example of information design, the goal of which is clarity and usefulness.
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Sinage design
As people become more mobile--expoloring different countries, cities, sites, and buildings--comples sinage design helps them locate their destinations and work out a travel plan.
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Environmental Design
Environmental graphics establish a particular sense of place through the use of two- and three-dimensional forms, graphics and signage.
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Digital Design
Digital design is the creation of highly manipulated images on the computer. These images then make their final appearance in print. Although computers have been around since the forties, they were not reasonable tools for designers until the first Macintoshes came out in 1984.
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Professor of Design
The best teaching is about learning, exploring and making connections. Teachers in professional programs are almost never exclusively educators; they also practice design.
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Systems design
Systems design seeks to unify and coordinate all aspects of a complex communication. It strives to achieve consistent verbal and visual treatment to reduce production time and cost. Systems design requires a careful problem-solving approach to handling complexity.
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Illustration
Drawing--deciding what is significant detail, what can be suggested, and what needs dramatic development--is a skill that all designers need in order to develop their own ideas and share them with others. Drawing is a rich and immediate way to represent the world, but drawing can also illustrate ideas in partnership with design.
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Multimedia design
Computer-based design delivers information according to the user's particular interest. Information is restructured into webs that allow entry from different point, a system that may be more like our actual thinking processes than the near order of the book is. On the computer, the designer can use time and sound in addition to text and image to draw attention, to animate an explanation, or to present an alternative way to understand a concept. This new technology demands designers who can combine analysis without intuition.
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Exhibit design
Objects, statistics, documentary photographs, labels, lighting, text and headlines, color, space and place--these are the materials of exhibition design. The designer's problem is how to frame these materials with a storyline that engages and informs an audience and make the story come alive.
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Type design
It is easy to overlook type design because it is everywhere. Typically we read for the client and ignore the familiar structural forms of our alphabet and its formal construction in a typeface. Only when the characters are very large or are presented to us in an unusual way, do we pay attention to the beautiful curves and rhythms of repetition that form our visible language.
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