Here's how you can distinguish between a career in graphic design and product design.

Both careers are creative, but they focus on different aspects of design and have different end goals. Think of graphic design as visual storytelling. Graphic designers create things like logos, websites, posters, and social media graphics. Their main goal is to communicate a message visually. They play with colors, fonts, images, and layouts to make something look good and get a specific point/ message across.

Graphic design primarily focuses on visual communication, encompassing creating logos, layouts, and branding materials to convey a message or evoke emotions. Product design involves designing tangible or digital products, considering usability, functionality, and aesthetics. While graphic designers emphasize 2D visuals, product designers tackle 3D or interactive experiences, integrating user needs with business goals. Graphic design often involves shorter-term projects with a clear visual outcome, while product design entails a more iterative process, involving research, prototyping, and testing to create user-centered solutions that enhance functionality and user experience.

Graphic design is all about visual communication. It's the art of using typography, imagery, color, and layout to convey a message or tell a story. Graphic designers work on a variety of projects, including branding, advertising, web design, and print media. If you love working with visuals and have a keen eye for aesthetics, graphic design could be your calling. Product design, on the other hand, is more about solving problems and creating functional, user-centered products. This field requires a blend of creativity, technical skills, and an understanding of user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design.

As someone started in the Graphic design realm and migrated to product, I can tell you the similarities are few. Graphic design use to be about aesthetics. Communication visually. The outputs were usually brand or marketing related - so the visual communication had to tell someone how to feel. As a product designer I needed to learn about business, investors, data, research and tech stakeholders, and their needs. I had to study the socio-economic and decision making factors of customers by doing qualitative and quantitative research. After this I had to create a pleasant, functional, delightful experience for the customer. In this case the end result would facilitate a space of function and service for the customer.

The narrative of user interactions is quite different in the two workflows, while the graphical part is mostly about the look and feel and the user experience is only one of many aspects here, the product design is about user-friendly interface and covering the full spectrum of support options, among others.

Unlike graphic design, which is concerned with visual aesthetics, product design focuses on user experience (UX) and user interaction. As a product designer, you'll conduct user research, create interfaces, and test items for usability and satisfaction. To develop practical and intuitive products, this job needs empathy and a grasp of human behavior. It also entails engaging with multiple stakeholders to guarantee that the product achieves design, technical, and commercial objectives. The ultimate goal is to develop things that are both visually attractive and functional.

Product design on the other hand is more about designing tangible items or digital products that people use. This can be hardware or software products such as gadgets, apps, webapp or even household items. Product designers focus on how something looks but also how it works. They consider user experience (UX), which means they think about how people will interact with the product and how to make it easy and enjoyable to use.

User Interaction is undoubtedly a critical aspect in product design; however, the true significance of a Product Designer becomes evident in scenarios such as air travel, where trust in the product's design is paramount. In such instances, the focus shifts from superficial elements like graphic design to essential factors like safety considerations, failure mode analysis, and precise engineering. A proficient product designer possesses the ability to anticipate and address users' unspoken concerns, seamlessly integrating functionality and safety without direct interaction. This holistic approach ensures that the designed product not only meets but exceeds user expectations, particularly in high-stakes environments like aviation.

Product design also includes the look and feel of the product not just interaction. The bottom line to this is that graphic design is and should be just one of the skill set a product designer should have

A Product designer must be an engineer but a graphic designer need not be an engineer, a product designer must consider the material of construction, Finite element analysis, Factor of safety to ensure the mechanical strength of the product by doing calculations complies to Law of the natural physics. Along with they must consider the behavior of the medium in and around the product and boundary conditions. Product designer's skill for 3D modeling, 2D drafting on the computer are only to visualize the product like a Graphic designer, the technical skill required for graphical designers are of software skills, and coding, for an advanced graphics requires some mathematical equation being developed in coding like animation etc..

I believe designers with graphic design background are far more advanced if they switch to digital/product than product designers who never did any graphic design work. Its not about the software but its about the core knowledge on fonts, spacings, margins, colors, etc.

Know how to use a Mac for design. “”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””

The skill most designers tend to miss is the design thinking process, it's ethos. It's not a technical one but the one that houses the technicalities like a dashboard in a car or an analytical dashboard of your website traffic. Being able to learn and apply that skill is of paramountce as it help you situate other necessary skills in graphic design - layout, color theory, elements and principles of design, narrative on top which learning adobe suite will be just be a your strongest tool at your disposal. For digital products, the standardisations become equally relevant such as - padding, spacing, hierarchy, copy and some can be fundamentally similar to those in graphics. Never forget, only tools change but the process remains the same.

Interesting that the immediate mediums for design are now digital. What's happened to the sketchbook? Of course this can be digital too, but there's nothing like honing you technical skills with a pen in hand. So much can be achieved in visualising a design without the need to jump straight to a computer for aid. As an Industrial Product designer, knowing how things work, how materials behave in certain conditions, and manufacturing processes are fundamental if you want to realise your ideas. Some business acumen is required as well. Afterall, you have to be able to make it and sell if for a profit. You almost have to become a generalist.

Yes, this is so true. The collaboration dynamic of a product designer is far more broad than that of a graphic designer. A product designer must see through the full life cycle of a product from ideation to market lunch and even after market launch

In my opinion, graphic designers need more creativity and visual knowledge since every work of them should be a crowd puller to an event or whatever it is. Once the idea is got then the post works are less but in product design, the idea generation is more simple than graphic designs. The post works for product designers are little more than graphic designers. They have to face a lot of constraints while making their product into reality.

This is also true about product designers, I might not say much about graphic designers, but for product designers I know this to be true because I am a product designer myself. We must see through from ideation to market launch and even after market launch

Product design offers a very broad horizon of opportunity. I studied Industrial Product Design and even 30 years later there's barely a day goes buy when I don't use those skilled I learnt. I designed buildings, consultancy services, websites, climbing equipment, bin lorries and more. All those products and services followed the same design methodology.

I'm not the one writing the future but we all collectively do so. And the change in present towards a transformed future, is that of no-code tools and environments. As standardisations help create a digital product, the same have also led to the creation of no-code front-end applications like Framer, Flutterflow, Bubble etc. and back-end apps like BuildShip, Backendless etc. These are providing designers and developers and those new to the field, with a strong and promising scope of growth, learning and soloprenuership as well. I would really like to mention #AmbitiousLabs where one can get to see such a community promoting and helping in creation of no-code eco-systems. In this way I can see, how one can truly play many roles.