Graphic design
Graphic design is a multifaceted discipline focused on visual communication that effectively conveys specific messages to targeted audiences. This profession combines text and imagery to produce various products, including books, magazines, advertisements, and digital content. Graphic designers employ a range of techniques to integrate color, typography, and images, aiming to create a cohesive and impactful visual representation of ideas. A significant aspect of commercial graphic design is brand promotion, utilizing strategic layouts and symbols to evoke emotional responses and foster brand recognition among consumers.
The roots of graphic design trace back to the Middle Ages, with early examples like illuminated manuscripts, which showcased vibrant illustrations alongside text. The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century marked a turning point, enabling mass production of printed materials and sparking advancements in book design. Over the centuries, graphic design evolved into a profession, particularly during the rise of consumerism in the nineteenth century, leading to a proliferation of everyday items such as greeting cards and packaging that relied on design to communicate effectively.
Today, graphic designers may also engage in specialized areas like illustration and interactive design, adapting their skills to meet the demands of various media. Typography plays a crucial role in this field, as designers select typefaces that enhance readability and visual appeal across different platforms, from print to digital screens. Overall, graphic design remains an essential component of modern communication, influencing everything from advertising to political messaging.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Graphic design
Graphic design is a complex means of visual communication that conveys concise strategic messages to a specific audience. As a profession, it entails blending words and images to create products such as books, magazines, advertisements, and electronic texts. Graphic designers use various methods to create and combine color, words, and images to visually represent ideas. Commercial graphic design combines typography, symbols, and carefully composed page layouts to convey a strategically focused message intended to create brand recognition or elicit certain feelings in a potential consumer. Graphic design is also a major component of product packaging, which requires the additional element of engineering.
Overview
Although graphic design is a modern concept, visual communications dates back to the advent of the Middle Ages. Monks created elaborate illuminated manuscripts on vellum, illustrating the text with bright colors and giving each individually created work its own personality. During the mid-fifteenth century, the development of printable woodcut images, movable type, and the printing press fueled the Renaissance. Florentine book publisher Aldus Manutius innovated the art of book design during this time, introducing pocket-sized books and the first italic type.
During the nineteenth century, graphic design emerged as an occupation alongside with the rise of consumerism, linked to the industrial arts instead of the fine arts. Visual communications became important in designing signage, manuals and textbooks, cartography, and mathematics, as well as advertising, international communications, branding, billboards, entertainment, and other materials that needed to quickly communicate ideas.
At this time, there were few great innovations in book typography, but graphic designers created numerous types of ephemera that became parts of people’s everyday lives: greeting cards, postcards, theater programs, food packages, transit tickets with logos, board games, and many other items that incorporated written language, design, and printing. Graphic designers working on advertising campaigns were part of a growing industry that coincided with the evolution of chromolithography printing. Children collected discarded scraps and repurposed them to compile in scrapbooks.
Graphic design has been subtly employed for commercial uses, politics, protest, and propaganda. In 1963, German-born color theorist Josef Albers of the Bauhaus movement published The Interaction of Color, in which he asserted that the juxtaposition of colors could psychologically manipulate the perceptions of the viewer.
Graphic and multimedia designers organize information in layouts on pages, whether on paper or on a screen. Graphic designers may also have specialized skills in illustration, photography, or interactive design. Typographers compose and typeset readable, easily comprehensible, and visually satisfying layouts that appear transparent to the reader. The choice of typefaces has evolved over time to coincide with changing media. When selecting a typeface for a design, a graphic designer must consider whether the design will appear in print, on a computer or smartphone screen, or in some other medium.
Bibliography
Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. 50th anniv. ed., Yale UP, 2013.
Cramsie, Patrick. The Story of Graphic Design: From the Invention of Writing to the Birth of Digital Design. Abrams, 2010.
Eskilson, Stephen J. Graphic Design: A New History. 3rd ed., Yale UP, 2019.
Felici, James. The Complete Manual of Typography: A Guide to Setting Perfect Type. 2nd ed. Peachpit, 2012.
Harris, Robert W. The Elements of Visual Style: The Basics of Print Design for Every PC and Mac User. Houghton, 2007.
Heller, Steven, and Mirko Ilić. Stop, Think, Go, Do: How Typography and Graphic Design Influence Behavior. Rockport, 2012.
Knight, Stan. Historical Types: From Guttenberg to Ashendene. Oak Knoll, 2012.
Mak, Bonnie. How the Page Matters. U of Toronto P, 2011.
Nickel, Kristina. Ready to Print: Handbook for Media Designers. Translated by Dylan Spiekermann. Gestalten, 2011.
Samara, Timothy. Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop. 3rd ed., Quarto Publishing Group, 2023.