Graphic design

Graphic design is the applied art of arranging image and text to communicate a message. It may be applied in any media, such as print, digital media, motion pictures, animation, product decoration, packaging, and signs. Graphic design as a practice can be traced back to the origin of the written word, but only in the late 19th century did it become identified as a separate entity.

Fundamental principles of design are alignment, balance, contrast, emphasis, movement, pattern, proportion, proximity, repetition, rhythm, unity, and white space.

Contents

1 Early history

Early history

A post-modern piece of graphic design in the "vector" form.

The compelling — if somewhat obscure — 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 in a form that would be acceptable even today. The Book is a lavishly illustrated hand-written copy of the Christian Bible created by Irish monks in the ninth century AD.

Johann Gutenberg's introduction of movable type in Europe made books widely available. The earliest books produced by Gutenberg's press and others of the era (the Incunabula) became the benchmark by which the design of future books, even as late as the 20th century, would be judged. Graphic design of this era is called either Old Style (especially the typefaces which these early typographers used), or Humanist, after the predominant philosophical school of the time.

Graphic design after Gutenberg saw a gradual evolution rather than any significant change, until the late 19th century when, especially in Britain, an effort was made to create a firm division between the fine and the applied arts.

Piet Mondrian 1872 is often called the father of graphic design. Although he was a fine artist (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.

From 1891 to 1896 William Morris' Kelmscott Press published 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. The work of the Kelmscott Press is characterized by its decadence and by its obsession with historical styles. This historicism was, however, historically 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.

20th century

Missing image
Normandie_poster.jpg

Famous SS Normandie poster by Adolphe Muron Cassandre.

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. The hallmark of early modern typography is the sans-serif typeface. Early Modern (not to be confused with the other modern era of the 18th and 19th centuries) typographers such as Edward Johnston and Eric Gill after him were inspired by vernacular and industrial typography of the latter nineteenth century. The signage in the London Underground is a classic of this era and used a font designed by Edward Johnston in 1916.

Jan Tschichold codified the principles of modern typography in his 1928 book, New Typography. He later repudiated the philosophy he espoused in this book as being fascistic, but it remained very influential. 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. They pioneered production techniques and stylistic devices used throughout the twentieth century. Today, although the computer has altered production forever, the experimental approach to design they pioneered is more relevant than ever. The dynamism, the experimentation, and even very specific things like typeface choice (Helvetica has seen a recent revival, it was an early design based indirectly on 19th century industrial typography) and strict, orthogonal composition.

The following years saw graphic design in the modern style gain widespread acceptance and application, while it simultaneously stagnated. Notable names in mid-century modern design are Adrian Frutiger, designer of the typefaces Univers and Frutiger; and Josef Müller-Brockmann, who designed posters in a severe yet accessible manner typical of the 1950s and 1960s.

The reaction to the increasing severity of graphic design was slow but inexorable. The origins of post-modern typography can be traced back as far as the humanist movement of the 1950s. Notable among this group is Hermann Zapf who designed two typefaces that remain ubiquitous — Palatino (1948) and Optima (1952). By blurring the line between serif and sans-serif typefaces and re-introducing organic lines into typography these designs did more to ratify modernism than they did to rebel.

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 criticised 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.

Missing image
Ilovenewyork.jpg

I Love New York campaign by Milton Glaser.

Another notable designer of the latter 20th century is Milton Glaser who designed the unmistakable I Love NY ad campaign (1973), and a famous Bob Dylan poster (1968). Glaser took stylistic hints from popular culture from the 1960s and 70s.

Advances in the early 20th century were largely inspired by technological advances in printing and also in photography. In the last decade of the same century, technology played a similar role, but this time it was the computer, and at first it was largely a step backwards. Zuzana Licko worked very early using computers for layout, in the days when computer memory was measured in kilobytes and typefaces were created using dots rather than lines. Together with her husband Rudy VanderLans they founded the pioneering Emigre magazine and the Emigre type foundry. They played with the extraordinary limitations of computers as something which, in itself, could provide creative freedom. Emigre magazine became the bible for digital design as the technology rapidly advanced to the point where the advantages outweighed the disadvantages.

David Carson is, in a sense, the culmination of the movement against the restrictiveness of modern design — some of his designs for Raygun magazine which he designed are intentionally illegible, designed to be visual rather than literary experiences. He began his career working with paste-ups in the traditional manner, but moved to computers quickly when he saw what they had become capable of.

Although they were very limiting at first, as computing power increased and software such as Adobe Photoshop emerged, it was evident exactly what kind of creative freedom and power that computers could provide. Image creation and manipulation using a computer demonstrated possibilities that had previously been unachievable. Another enormous development that computers provided to designers was the ability for them to set their own type, instantly seeing how it affected their design or layout, which allowed for new and more radical use of typography. Computers quickly grew to become an essential tool used in the graphic design industry.