History of graphic design
The graphics in these books reflect the influence of the Animal style associated with the "barbarian" peoples of Northern Europe, with much use of interlace and geometric decoration.
[b] Chinese playing cards, as we understand the term today, date from at least 1294, when Yen Sengzhu and Zheng Pig-Dog were apparently caught gambling in Enzhou (in modern Shandong Province).
The rose symbol represents: community (the flower's petals), socialism (its red color), taking care of those who are less able to compete (the fragility), the struggle (the thorns), cultural life (beauty).
[28] Known worldwide for its panda logo, the Switzerland-based World Wildlife Fund (WWF) participates in international efforts to protect endangered species and their habitats.
[29] Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, is best known for its humanitarian projects in war-torn regions and developing countries facing endemic disease.
In the 1920s he joined the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists, who attempted to establish a scientific foundation for philosophy; and at the same time he pioneered the graphic methods that became Isotype and were shown in the Museum of Society and Economy.
Published in leftist magazines, his work was noticed by Otto Neurath who for his "Vienna method of visual statistics" needed a designer of pictograms that could summarize a subject at a glance.
As Marina Vishmidt suggests: "Neurath's pictograms owe much to the Modernist belief that reality may be modified by being codified – standardised, easy-to-grasp templates as a revolution in human affairs.
Persian reliefs depicted important historical events; the Greek axons and the Roman albums, with their decorative designs and announcements, were quite similar to today's posters.
Its great advantage was that, unlike engraving which requires special skill in metalworking, etching is relatively easy to learn for an artist trained in drawing.
In the second half of the 19th century, William Morris's Kelmscott Press produced many historicist graphic designs and created a collectors market for this kind of art.
[55] In 1917, Frederick H. Meyer, director and instructor at the California School of Arts and Crafts, taught a class entitled “Graphic Design and Lettering”.
Concert posters, album covers, light shows, murals, comic books, underground newspapers, and more reflected revolutionary political, social, and spiritual sentiments inspired by psychedelic states of consciousness.
The English rock band Pink Floyd worked extensively with London-based designers Hipgnosis to create graphics to support the concepts in their albums like the cover of the soundtrack of the film More'.
Life magazine's cover and lead article for the September 1, 1967, issue at the height of the Summer of Love focused on the explosion of psychedelic art on posters and the artists as leaders in the hippie counterculture community.
[63] The poster, "Time is Money", features the famous Canadian doctor Norman Bethune (Dr. Bai Qiuen in Chinese), racing to rescue another patient.
With software such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and Microsoft Paint, image editing has become very cheap and artists can easily experiment with a variety of color schemes, filters, and special effects.
For instance, utilizing various filters of Photoshop, many artists have created "vectored" designs in posters where a photographic image is solarized, sharpened, rendered into watercolor or stained glass effects, or converted into bare lines with block colors.
Graphic design is used in advertising to announce a persuasive message by an identified sponsor, or the promotion by a firm of its products to existing and potential customers.
The internationally recognized artist Otl Aicher was a graphic designer, urban planner, photographer, and the mastermind behind the imagery for the 1972 Munich Olympics and the Rotis typeface.
After the war Aicher went on to help rebuild his ravaged city of Ulm and to found the influential international school of design, Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG).
Otl Aicher was appointed as the head of the committee's visual design group, and his mandate was to deploy art in a relatively new role of promoting this global public event.
As Benjamin Secher writes: He devised an invigorating, almost Day-glo palette for the Olympics that was utterly free of red and black — banned for their association with the German flag.
Athletes depicted in the official posters for each sport had their uniforms stripped of any national identifier, leaving the emphasis firmly on individual effort.
[72] Aicher developed a comprehensive system to articulate the games' character across a wide range of materials, from signage to printed pieces and even staff uniforms.
As the introduction to his exhibition at states: "His works, including official posters and sporting event tickets, demonstrate the design tools Aicher used to join individual elements to the collective: structural grids, a bold and animating color palette, and ingenious pictograms.
Aicher's orderly and pleasant design nimbly carried the weight of modern German history as it repositioned the nation's hospitality on the world stage".
Due to the fact that graphic design constitutes the main foundation of comics, it plays a crucial role in conveying various narratives through its compositional devices, line drawings, and colouring scheme.
Yet, when it comes to web design it's rare that all elements — functionality, clarity of information, and subjective beauty — come together to create a result that is widely admired, recognized or lauded in the same vein as anything resembling the likes of Saul Bass’ AT&T logo, or Susan Kare's icons for the original Mac OS".
Tim Berners-Lee,[82] who did the initial development stage, was interested in the ability to link academic papers electronically and to utilize the Internet in order to correspond with people in other laboratories around the world.
