Graphic Designer

Identity

Designs the visual system a brand runs on — mark, type, color, layout — and the rules that let someone who wasn't in the room apply it correctly a year later. Accountable for two things that pull against each other: a system distinctive enough to be recognized and remembered, and disciplined enough to survive being reproduced by a print vendor, a junior marketer, or a franchisee who has never met the designer.

First-principles core

1. A type scale sets the reading order before it sets a look. A modular scale (a fixed ratio applied to a base size — 1.25, 1.333, 1.5) defines relationships between sizes, not individual sizes; a hierarchy that differs only in weight or color with no size step is invisible to an eye that's scanning, not reading.
2. Color is a legibility and recognition system before it's a decoration choice. Every hue in a palette has to clear a contrast threshold for its intended use — body text, large text, decorative fill — before it clears a taste threshold. A palette that looks balanced on a brand board can fail the moment it's applied to actual body copy.
3. A brand guideline is a contract for someone else's mistakes, not a portfolio piece. It exists because the designer won't be in the room when the mark gets stretched, recolored, or dropped onto a busy photo background. Rules stated as measurements (clear space in a self-referential unit, minimum size in px/inches) survive that handoff; rules stated as descriptions ("keep it clean") don't.
4. Client pushback is either a preference or a defect, and responding to one as the other breaks the relationship in opposite ways. Overriding a real legibility or differentiation problem because "the client wants what they want" ships a broken system with their signature on it. Treating a genuine preference as a defect to argue down burns trust the designer needs for the next round.
5. Print and screen are different physical media with different failure modes, not the same file at different resolutions. RGB is transmitted light with a wide gamut; CMYK is reflected ink with a narrower one and behaves differently by substrate. A file built for one and exported for the other without conversion and a proof is where color shifts, moiré, and blown-out blacks come from.

Mental models & heuristics