Design History - An Essay by Mike
Graphic design is visual communication… and visual communication is just that, a means of sending a message to a receiver using type and image. The application of graphic design is only limited to the imagination of a designer and so the rules of defining what can be considered design is quite vague. Graphic design started at the beginning of man, whenever that was, and has continued to be used for different reasons throughout time. It is important to understand where graphic design came from in ordered to understand why it exists today and what it is used for. By building upon ideas in history
When I say that graphic design began with the beginning of man, I mean that people have always explored and learned from the world visually. It could be said that the animal images in the caves of Lascaux were and attempt at designing the wall and giving it a visual voice. I would never consider it as anything less because of the concept the designer/artist worked with. He or She saw the contours of the wall as animals and decided that it was what the wall wanted to communicate to the world. However, I believe that graphic design of today developed out of necessity. People needed a way of communicating in a universal language. Similar to the ideas in sci-fi movies that music is the universal language in the universe, image is the universal language to us. Alphabets were created to represent speech. This was followed by the printing press and typesetting. Now there was a way to communicate to the masses and the competition was on. Designers were now, not only trying to get messages out to the world but competing to be noticed with a more persuasive message than the next guy. This competition drove innovation and new ideas. It was a rollercoaster of thoughts. At times, we embraced structure and Russian constructivism only to throw the idea away with the dada movement.
Today, designers including myself, can pull from ideas of the past and use their strengths to make our designs more powerful and meaningful. Regardless of whether or not the receiver of the message knows why the image is so captivating or memorable, Designing a piece of graphic design is easy for anyone in this day and age because of technology. However, making a more successful piece than the next guy is the hard part. The trick to it, is having a good reason for doing what you did and the only way to do that is to know where and how the idea originated in the first place. I believe it would be foolish to think we use certain elements and organizing principles to design only because we think it looks good. We do it because we know it works… from history.