Who is David Craib?

I am a visual communication designer with almost 30 years experience. Back in 1982, I moved from Montreal to Toronto to study Industrial Design at Ontario College of Art – but I didn’t study that. I studied visual communication design instead. Visual communication design was like art that worked, and that fascinated me. After four years at OCA, I graduated and entered the working world.

In 1994, I opened my company, Parable Communications, a small design boutique in Ottawa, Canada. For the next 20 years we produced some of the area’s best communication design work, including many award-winning posters, annual reports and corporate identities, and in 2000, Canada’s worlds fair pavilion. By 2014, our main staples were chiefly annual reports and other electronic and print publications.

But I meant to mention that, in 2010, I went back to school. That is really the point of all of this. And strangely enough, I returned to where I started, studying through Carleton University’s Industrial Design department. And I kept my focus on communication design as well. I guess you could say that I began to explore what fascinated me in the first place – that visual communication design is like art that works – and how it works was what I wanted to find out.

This blog will discuss visual communication design theory. Its purpose is to understand how we engineer the transfer of meaning through visual means. It will explore visual communication design through an interdisciplinary approach, analyzing design theory somewhat scientifically. The blog may focus on issues that relate to other design forms as well, as the transfer of meaning may be the main goal of other design disciplines – such as industrial design, which may aim to transfer usability information through visual and physical means. In this sense, a key goal of many design disciplines is information transfer.

So please join me in analyzing, through an interdisciplinary lens, how visual communication design works.

David Craib
June 2014
Ottawa, Canada