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The History of Graphic Design...
...is as old as time, further back then the earliest verbal communications. As far back as the 6th century B.C., man was using symbols and ideographs to represent the world around them. A visual way to get their ideas and thoughts across.
The Cretans used pictographs as far back as 2000 B.C. and the phonetic alphabet dates back to 1500 B.C. with the Phoenicians. Egyptian graphics is now looked upon as an art form. Meticulously carved designs representing both a person's life and afterlife were found on their sarcophagus. The development of papyrus was a major development in the Egyptian visual communication. They are also credited with the first illuminated manuscripts.
Although it is speculated that paper in China by Ts'ai Lun in 100 A.D., it took over 500 years to find it's way to Europe when the Arabs learn papermaking fro prisoners in 751 A.D. Prior to that, the printed word was by hand on papyrus, clay & vellum. Tools for printing in the eastern culture were devised from blocks of wood individually carved. In these eastern cultures, the moveable type consisted of over 40,000 characters.
In Europe, the scriptoria, which were usually only found in the monasteries, are where writers transcribed books into beautiful works of art called Illuminated manuscripts. These books were a labor of love to be shared with those in proclamation of the Gospel and other forms of prayer.
Block printing came to Europe shortly before 1400 A.D., with moveable type becoming the source of ideas for what was still yet to come. In the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg, experimenting with moveable type, is credited with the first printing press. Type facing was developed in the 16th - 18th centuries. In the late 19th century, both the rotary-web press and then several decades later, the line-casting machine was invented.
Graphics evolved with each generation creating their own history and style. The Renaissance saw Germany with their own style of illustrations. The Industrial Revolution brought visual communications based on industrial technology flowing into the Victorian era and the era of Ukiyo-e and Nouveau.
Modern art and pictorial modernism became the new graphics of the early 20th century. Art became a new language.
Photography was a new art also in the 19th century and had an incredible impact on graphics design. In the 1920' the four-color process was invented using only four different color inks: cyan - magenta - yellow - black. The 1950's brought phototypesetting and the late 1970's brought digital typesetting with scanners replacing cameras for the reproduction.
Graphic Design certainly has evolved over the years.
Another window of graphic design is desktop publishing. The personal computer is responsible for compacting the many steps needed to put out a publication. In 1985 desktop publishing was set loose to the world. There were three key events that this happened: The Laser Writer by Apple Computer, Adobe introduced PostScript and Aldus Corporation released Page Maker.
Where traditionally in order to get the job done, there was the writer, designer, artist and the typesetter. Their work went into either type, design or camera ready art specs. Then the paste-up artist would take all their information and work and paste it on boards that would then travel through a special camera which would generate large negatives of entire pages. The negatives would then be given to the press operator who would take it through several processes before the final job was completed.
Now, with personal computers, the writer (after the edits) and artist send the work to the designer where the designer can layout the whole job on an art board created right on the screen of his/her computer monitor using software progam. The finished product is taken to a service where proofs are printed, reviewed and sent to the press operator. Depending on the size and quality of the job, negatives or plates are made digitally and the final pages are printed, cut, bound and ready to go.
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