When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them that I’m a graphic designer. They look at me as if I’ve just spoken to them in another language. This is an almost universal reaction when speaking to people outside of the industry.

It’s understandable. Graphic design is a somewhat secluded profession, and often quite mysterious. The main problem with the term “graphic design” is that so many things fall under such a broad term making it difficult to pin point exactly what it is I do when I’m talking to people with no knowledge. I often go for the layman’s approach to describing it: “I design business cards, letterheads, leaflets, brochures, stuff like that”. But that doesn’t even come close to what I do really.

Let me split it down into two sections to make it a bit easier. The web bit - the work I do on the Internet such as designing and building websites, and the print bit - everything else I do that isn’t online.

The Web Stuff
This bit is often a lot easier to describe to people than the other side of what I do - I design websites. Design in this sense tends to involve a lot of things; creating the overall visual look of the website, crafting the experience that the user will go through, and figuring out how anyone who visits the website will interact with it, and in what way. A lot of these steps fall into place all at once when I’m putting ideas down for a website.

Once that’s completed and the client likes what I’ve done, the next stage is to get that image onto the Internet as a fully-functioning website. Unsurprisingly this process takes longer than designing it, and to explain exactly what I do here would both bore you and make you want to kill yourself, so I’ll avoid going into any more depth than that.

The Print Stuff
As for the print work that I do… well, I do all sorts. Almost anything you can think of that is printed I design: brochures, adverts, business cards, posters, events lists, menus, the list goes on and on. That’s primarily why it’s so difficult to pigeonhole this side of my work into an easy way to understand it - because there’s just such a wide variety of it.

So, I hope that helps you understand how difficult it is to describe exactly what I do in less than 4 hours.