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 Information_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.

Early history

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.

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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.

Related Topics:
Book of Kells - Christian Bible - Irish - Monks

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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.

Related Topics:
Johann Gutenberg - Movable type - Europe - Incunabula - 20th century - Typeface - Typographer

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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.

Related Topics:
19th century - Britain - Fine

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Piet Mondrian, born in 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.

Related Topics:
Piet Mondrian - Grids

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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.

Related Topics:
1891 - 1896 - William Morris - Arts and Crafts movement - Private Press - Art Nouveau

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