Graphics & Design
Hire designers on Buxonline for logos, illustrations, and visual assets — small design jobs starting at $1.
About graphics & design
Graphics and design work translates ideas, information and identity into visual form. A designer might create a logo that represents a company's values, lay out a magazine so readers move through it naturally, design packaging that protects a product while catching the eye on a shelf, or build a visual system for an app that makes every screen feel coherent. The work spans print, digital, motion and environmental contexts, each with its own technical requirements and constraints.
Doing this well means understanding both communication and craft. A good designer considers who will see the work, what they need to understand or feel, and how they'll encounter it—whether that's a billboard seen at speed, a website viewed on different devices, or a business card handed across a table. Hierarchy, contrast, spacing and typeface selection all serve that purpose. Poor design often results from treating aesthetics as separate from function: a beautiful layout that buries the most important information, or a logo that reproduces badly at small sizes, or colours chosen without checking how they print.
The field divides into specialisms—brand identity, publication design, packaging, UI design, illustration, typography, motion graphics—but most projects draw on several. A product launch might need packaging design, marketing materials, social media graphics and a microsite, all holding together visually while working in their distinct contexts.
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Graphics & Design — questions and answers
- What's the difference between RGB and CMYK, and when does it matter?
- RGB uses light (red, green, blue) for screens; CMYK uses ink (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) for printing. Designs created in RGB often look duller when converted to CMYK because printed ink can't reproduce the full brightness of light. Always work in CMYK from the start for anything going to a commercial printer, and RGB for anything staying on screen.
- What file formats should a finished design be delivered in?
- It depends on use. Print typically needs PDF with bleed and crop marks, sometimes native files like AI or INDD with linked images. Digital work might be PNG for transparency, JPG for photos, SVG for logos that scale, or platform-specific formats like Figma or Sketch files for developers to extract assets from.
- How does designing for print differ from designing for screens?
- Print is fixed and permanent; you control exactly what someone sees. Screens are variable—different sizes, resolutions, brightness levels—and often interactive. Print uses CMYK colour and measures in millimetres or inches; digital uses RGB and pixels. Print needs bleed and higher resolution (usually 300 dpi); screen work sits at 72 or 96 ppi but must adapt to retina displays.
- What does 'bleed' mean in print design?
- Bleed is the extra image area extending beyond the trim edge, typically 3mm. When a printer cuts hundreds of sheets, tiny variations mean the cut isn't perfectly precise. Without bleed, you'd risk white slivers at the edges. Any element meant to run to the page edge must extend into the bleed area.
- Can a logo designed for a website be used on a billboard?
- Only if it's been created as vector artwork in formats like AI, EPS or SVG. These scale infinitely without losing quality. A logo saved only as a PNG or JPG from a website is raster-based—made of pixels—and will look blurred or pixelated when enlarged. Always keep the original vector file.
- What's a brand style guide and what goes in it?
- A style guide documents how to use a brand's visual identity consistently. It typically includes logo variations and clearance space, colour values (Pantone, CMYK, RGB, hex), typefaces with usage rules, image style, graphic elements, and examples of correct and incorrect applications. It ensures anyone creating materials maintains visual coherence.
