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Visual Design vs UI Design: Understanding the Key Differences
5 Dec 2024

Visual Design vs UI Design: Understanding the Key Differences

When you open an app or visit a website, what catches your eye?


Are the vibrant colors, the stylish fonts, or neatly placed buttons and icons drawing your attention?


On the other hand, you must have closed a website or uninstalled an app because it didn’t look right or felt cluttered.


On mobile apps, distractions like intrusive pop-ups, overwhelming notifications, or visually confusing layouts often cause users to exit or uninstall the app.


A Localytics study suggests that 32% of users remain in an app after ten sessions. Also, 25% of apps are used only once. This means a clean, clutter-free UI can have a huge impact on user engagement and business outcomes.


Visual and UI design shape these features. While they both sound similar, they have different roles in creating a digital experience that clicks with your audience.


Visual Design

UI Design


Visual design focuses on the look and feel of your product, using color choice, images, and layouts to appeal to users while communicating your brand’s message.


UI design is about making interactive elements—like buttons and menus—easy to use and guiding users to act promptly.


Visual Design vs UI Design – The Core Differences

Understanding the core differences between visual design and UI helps make informed decisions to better the overall user experience.


Below, we’ll explore how they differ in terms of goals, tool usage, team member roles, and scope of work.

Goals of Visual Design and UI Design

Goal-wise, visual design requires capturing attention and conveying a brand’s personality through aesthetics.


However, UI blends with macro-level UX goals to design a product with smooth usability.


Let’s find out more.


Visual Design: Visual design aims to craft the look and feel of your product, making it appealing and engaging.


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This primarily requires zeroing down on aesthetic elements that catch users' attention, like layout and spacing, so that everything looks harmonious.


It includes:

  1. Establishing a brand identity based on a consistent visual language that reflects your brand’s values and personality. Your design team will focus on selecting colors, typography, and imagery that align with your brand identity.
  2. Enhancing aesthetics captures users’ attention and keeps them engaged. You are not just thinking about making it look good but having confidence that visuals support your product’s purpose and resonate with your audience.
  3. Craft visuals that connect with users on an emotional level, evoking emotional responses and fostering a positive association with your product.

UI Design: UI design takes a holistic approach to user interaction, aiming to enhance the user’s experience while using your product or navigating it intuitively.

The main goals are:

  1. Enhancing usability and accessibility by designing interfaces that are easy to navigate for all users, including those with disabilities
  2. Improving user satisfaction by ensuring the product meets user needs and offers a positive experience that encourages continued use and loyalty.
  3. Making it easy for users to go through the information or perform tasks quickly and easily.

Tools used for Visual Design vs UI/UX Design

A good set of tools will affect the quality and efficiency of your design work. Visual design and UI design each use software tailored to their unique needs and objectives.


Visual Design Tools

Visual designers rely on programs that allow them to create stunning graphics, manipulate images, and craft cohesive visual identities.


Here are some of the most popular tools in visual design:

  1. Adobe Photoshop: Useful in editing photos, creating digital art, and designing graphics with pixel-level precision.
  2. Adobe Illustrator: Perfect for creating vector graphics like logos, icons, and illustrations that need to scale without losing quality.
  3. Affinity Designer: An affordable alternative offering powerful vector and rastering design tools for both web and graphic design projects.

UI Design

Designers committed to creating top-notch UX/UI will need tools for prototyping and testing user interfaces to ensure smooth and intuitive in-product or onsite interactions.

  1. MockFlow: Offers a useful set of features, suites, solutions, and tools that help create wireframes and prototypes quickly. With features like UI Components and UI Kits, MockFlow offers drag-and-drop pre-built elements to save time and ensure consistency.
  2. Figma: A cloud-based tool for real-time collaboration that works excellent for designing interfaces and prototyping.
  3. Adobe XD: A powerful tool designed for UI designers to create wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity designs using features like responsive resize and auto-animate while offering integration with other Adobe Creative Cloud apps.

Roles of Team Members in Visual Design & UI Design

A slick, intuitive, visually appealing product takes a team. Each brings expertise to the table.


There is a visual design and UI design team at work. While they work closely together, each has specific roles that help shape the overall product’s design.


Let’s see who’s responsible for what in each area.


Visual Design Team: The visual design team is responsible for capturing the brand’s personality and ensuring that the product looks and feels right at every touchpoint.

Here’s who usually handles this:

  1. Visual Designer: They stylize the brand by handling everything from color schemes to typography to craft a consistent look that feels true to the brand. They ensure that every part of the design speaks the same visual language.
  2. Graphic Designer: They’re responsible for creating custom visuals like icons, banners, and illustrations, which results in eye-catching visual elements that elevate the design.
  3. Brand Strategist: They’re the glue between visual design and the brand’s core values and make sure that the final design reflects the brand’s personality.

UI Design Team: The visual design team makes things look good, but the UI team enables users to navigate and interact with the product smoothly. The UI design team's experts check for usability, functionality, and design, which helps achieve UX goals.

  1. UI Designer: They’re the architects of the interface who decide how buttons, menus, and other interactive elements look and work, focusing on making the product intuitive and user-friendly.
  2. UX Designer: UX designers work closely with UI designers to map out the user journey and shape the flow and structure of an app so that users can accomplish tasks without getting lost or frustrated.
  3. Interaction Designer: Interaction designers add animations and transitions to bring in micro-interactions that make the experience feel responsive.

Scope of Visual design vs UI design

Grasping the scope of visual design and UI/UX design clarifies how each contributes to your product. While they often collaborate, their responsibilities differ in key ways.


Visual Design: The scope of visual design is focused on the visual aspects of your product’s visual designers who work on —

  1. Creating visual assets like icons, buttons, and other graphical elements that appear on the screen.
  2. Ensure alignment of branding elements and visuals.
  3. Get into the process of the idea to prototyping to produce mockups to show how the final product will look.

UI Design: The scope of UI design is to have the user journey in a way that tasks them with y with tasks lined up for the following:

  1. Understanding your audience’s needs, preferences, and pain points through surveys and interviews.
  2. Leveraging information architecture to organize content and features in a logical way to make navigation intuitive.
  3. Perform prototyping and testing by creating wireframes and interactive prototypes while testing them with real users and gathering feedback to refine the design.

Where Do Visual design and UI design overlap?

Visual design and UI design have their different areas of focus, but they also work together to create products that are appealing and easy to use. Recognizing where they meet can help you get the best of both worlds.


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Image Source



Here are some key areas where visual design and UI/UX design intersect:

User Interface Elements

Both visual designers and UI/UX teams collaborate on creating buttons, icons, and other interactive parts of your product. Visual design elements ensure that the product looks good, while UI/UX design must be easy to interact with.

Consistency and Branding

Keeping a consistent style throughout your product helps users feel comfortable. Both fields work to align the interface with your brand’s identity, using colors, fonts, and images that reflect your values.

Creating Visual Hierarchy

Visual design and UI share the goal of helping users find what they need quickly. Arranging content by size, color, and placement will guide the user’s attention to important areas.

Building Emotional Connection

Both visual design and UI teams work to make your product resonate with users. They blend attractive visuals with smooth interactions to create a positive experience that users will remember.

Participate in Usability Testing

UI and visual design work together to test the product with real users. Feedback from these tests helps improve the interface's look and functionality.


Wrapping Up: Understanding the Distinction Between Visual and UI Design

Understanding the differences between visual design and UI design can help create products that are both eye-catching and easy to use. 


With visual design, you align your team to work on product appearance—colors, fonts, and layouts that grab attention and express your brand’s personality. Then there’s UI, which has UX at its center, and designers work to let users interact smoothly with your product in a natural manner. 


The two often overlap when designing things like buttons and menus, working together to build a unified experience. Recognizing the unique contributions of each discipline helps you make better design decisions and collaborate more effectively with your team.

Enhance collaboration and streamline your design process with MockFlow – give it a try today!

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