A set of skills and techniques employed in the design of all printed matter. The major skills include typography, photography, illustration, and printmaking. These disciplines, formerly taught and practised more or less in isolation, have been successfully brought together through the dominance of offset lithography as the most popular printing method and the development of allied photographic techniques.
The art of graphic design embraces a range of mental skills and crafts including typography, image development and page layout. Graphic design is applied in communication design and fine art. Like many forms of communication, graphic design often refers to both the process (designing) by which the communication is created, and the products (designs) such as creative solutions, imagery and multimedia compositions. In commercial art, client edits, technical preparation and mass production are usually required, but usually not considered to be within the scope of graphic design.Although the term 'graphic designer' was first coined in the 20th century, the story of graphic design spans the history of marks of humankind from the magic of the caves of Lascaux to the dazzling neons of Ginza. In both this lengthy history and in the relatively recent explosion of imaging in the 20th and 21st centuries, there is sometimes a blurring distinction and over-lapping of advertising art, graphic design and fine art. In graphic design, "the essence is to give order to information, form to ideas, expression and feeling to artifacts that document human experience."
Principles and elements of design
Design elements are the basic tools in every design discipline.
Graphic design theory
According to the classic theory of design, or graphic design, visual design, art, the visual excitement of a work of design is a result of how the composition of the design elements create mood, style, message, and a look.
See also Aesthetics
There is research and planning that is needed for most design work:
the design process, which encompasses the step-by-step and often complex path that a designer takes toward a design solution through research, exploration, re-evaluation, and revision of a design problem. Graphic designers are usually first to adopt and incorporate new technology in solutions or concepts when possible.The classic theory of design continues to be the first one introduced to starting students and amateurs, with details such as the number of principles varying from book to book and instructor to instructor. However, the classic theory of design is limited in scope as it only considers the decorative aspects of design.
Graphic design history
The paintings in the caves of Lascaux around 14,000 BC and the birth of written language in the third or fourth millennium BC are both significant milestones in the history of graphic design and other fields which hold roots to graphic design.
The Book of Kells is a very beautiful and very early example of graphic design. Graphic design of this era is sometimes called either Old Style (after the Gothic and handwriting-based typefaces which the earliest typographers used), or Humanist, after the new typefaces imitating the lettering in Roman carved inscriptions.
Graphic design after Gutenberg saw a gradual evolution rather than any significant change.
From 1891 to 1896 William Morris' Kelmscott Press published books that are some of the most significant of the graphic design products of the Arts and Crafts movement, and made a very lucrative business of creating books of great stylistic refinement and selling them to the wealthy for a premium. Morris proved that a market existed for works of graphic design and helped pioneer the separation of design from production and from fine art. This historicism was, however, important as it amounted to the first significant reaction to the stale state of nineteenth-century graphic design. Morris' work, along with the rest of the Private Press movement, directly influenced Art Nouveau and is indirectly responsible for developments in early twentieth century graphic design in general.
Piet Mondrian, born in 1872, was a painter whose work was influential in modern graphic design. Although he was not a graphic designer his use of grids inspired the basic structure of the modern advertising layout known also as the grid system, used commonly today by graphic designers.
20th century
Modern design of the early 20th century, much like the fine art of the same period, was a reaction against the decadence of typography and design of the late 19th century. Tschichold, Bauhaus typographers such as Herbert Bayer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and El Lissitzky are the fathers of graphic design as we know it today.
The following years saw graphic design in the modern style gain widespread acceptance and application. A booming post-World War II American economy established a greater need for graphic design, mainly advertising and packaging. Paul Rand, who, from the late 1930's until his death in 1996, took the principles of the Bauhaus and applied them to popular advertising and logo design, helping to create a uniquely American approach to European minimalism while becoming one of the principal pioneers of the subset of graphic design known as corporate identity;
The reaction to the increasing severity of graphic design was slow but inexorable.
An important point was reached in graphic design with the publishing of the First things first 1964 Manifesto which was a call to a more radical form of graphic design and criticized the ideas of value-free design. This was massively influential on a generation of new graphic designers and contributed to the founding of publications such as Emigre magazine.
Saul Bass designed many motion picture title sequences which feature new and innovative methods of production and startling graphic design to attempt to tell some of the story in the first few minutes.
Milton Glaser designed the unmistakable I Love NY ad campaign (1973) and a famous Bob Dylan poster (1968).
David Carson has gone against the restrictiveness of modern designs. Some of his designs for Raygun magazine are intentionally illegible, featuring typography designed to be visual rather than literary experiences.
Use of computers
In the mid 1980s, the arrival of desktop publishing and the introduction of software applications introduced a generation of designers to computer image manipulation and 3D image creation that had previously been unachievable. Computer graphic design enabled designers to instantly see the effects of layout or typography changes without using any ink in the process. For more details on software used by graphic designers, see art software.
Computers are now considered to be an indispensable tool used in the graphic design industry.
Computers may or may not enhance the creative process of graphic design, depending on which process best stimulates the creativity of the designer. Some creative graphic design ideas are initiated and developed to near completion in the mind, before either traditional methods or the computer is used. Hand rendered comps may be used to get approval of a graphic design idea before investing what would be too much time to produce on a computer if rejected. Traditional graphic designers may employ computer-savvy production artists to produce their ideas from sketches, without needing to learn the computer skills themselves.
The use of computers in design is sometimes referred to as CAD (computer aided design), the same abbreviation of computer aided drafting and a homophone of the acronym computer aided design & This makes no distinction between graphic design and technical drawing. Due to this common misunderstanding, CAD is rarely used to describe computer use in graphic design. The more common term used to describe computer use in graphic design is DTP (desktop publishing). However, DTP is often oversimplified to the narrower scope of graphic design known as page layout and publishing technology.
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