
Visual design is everywhere in our daily lives. It’s an important part of how we see and interact with the world. In this blog post, Joseph discusses his experience with artistic design and why it is important to design with accessibility in mind.
Written by Joseph Lek, Digital Communications Coordinator, Honours Bachelor of Arts, Communication, Culture, Information & Technology and Art & Art History Double Major
Imagine you are walking down the streets of a bustling city, browsing through social media on your phone, or even watching your favourite piece of entertainment media on TV. In each scenario, you would have encountered visual design.
I have always been fascinated with art, and often think about creative ways to present information, ideas and stories in a visual format. My undergraduate studies gave me plenty of knowledge about art, visual design, and the opportunity to put my learnings to practice when executing my own artistic designs, whether it be in a physical or digital medium.
After joining the Innovation Hub, I learned about accessibility by design, which is a value that ensures that projects, events, and materials are designed to be made accessible to as many people as possible. After learning this, I knew that I could grow even further in my artistic work in visual design by bringing in accessible design to the graphics and communications materials that we make at the iHub.
Uniting Artistic Style and Accessibility

As a former design student who came from an art background, it was sometimes hard for me to incorporate all my imaginative ideas to my work whenever I had to create things with accessibility in mind. A part of me loves the chaotic nature of artistic expression, but I understand that it can get in the way of making things accessible. When comparing artistic design to accessible design in visual materials, I often see this as a situation of creating for style vs. creating for practicality. But upon further reflection, I realized that it is not so much about choosing one over the other, but rather, finding a good balance between the two. This can put restraints on the creative process for coming up with visual designs, but as a former design professor once taught me, restraints in design can help focus the overall direction of your design vision.
These learnings helped me reframe my thoughts on the design process, which involved placing more emphasis on accessible approaches to design rather than just considering artistic aesthetics. From this new perspective, I found accessible design to be very important for visual design work as it ensures that everyone can participate in and enjoy the viewing experience of a piece of visual content. In turn, more people can engage with the work that you have created.
Accessible Design: A Constant Learning Experience

I remember when I started my studies in studio art and enrolled in design courses, I learned many good practices for accessible design in visual graphics. From listening to my amazing instructors and observing the work of my peers in artist critique sessions, I picked up on a lot of accessible design practices that I didn’t think about as much before, such as creating visually pleasing compositions that are not too overwhelming for viewers, and designing layouts that are easy for viewers to identify the main area(s) of focus.
When I asked my team of graphic designers about their experience with accessible design and what they learned, they discussed how they adopted a lot of accessible design practices after working as graphic designers in a professional setting. The team mentioned various things to consider, such as designing with accessibility from the start to understand early on where the design can and cannot go, incorporating design elements that would be invisible at first glance (e.g., alternative text for graphics), considering design choices that affect readability (e.g., font type/style, font size, colour contrast), and being mindful of what visuals to use and how they could be interpreted by different audiences. Overall, the team really appreciated learning about accessible design practices for their work and found it valuable for how they approach design moving forward.
Putting Accessible Design to Practice

At the Innovation Hub, there are many ways that we incorporate accessible design into our graphics and materials. When creating graphics, our team will always start with creating mood boards that are filled with various pieces of inspiration. By doing this, we not only get to brainstorm design concepts, but we also gain a better understanding of which ideas may be less accessible to a wide audience. Some of the key elements we always look at when creating graphics are colour contrast, font size/style, and page layouts to make sure that it is easy to read for all audiences. To assist audiences with visual disabilities, we also make sure to add alternative text to all produced graphics and perform accessibility checks to our PDF communications materials so that readers can use assistive technology, such as screen readers, to listen to the information on the page being read to them in descriptive detail.
Designing for an Accessible Future
As we move further into a digital age, it becomes harder for us not to encounter some form of visual design. As the volume of visual content that we see in our daily lives continues to grow, so does the importance of ensuring that visual designs can be viewed and enjoyed by anyone. Visual design is always a continuous learning process. It isn’t just new trends in visual styles that designers learn, but also the amazing, new innovations in accessible design that we, as designers, strive towards to make our work as accessible as possible. As a designer myself, I encourage all of you to consider accessibility in design and think about how you can apply it to your work to push the limits of your designs. I, for one, am excited to see how far we can push our understanding of accessibility to allow as many people as possible enjoy the work that we create and share!
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