what is graphic design?

Graphic design is the most ubiquitous of all the arts. It responds to needs at once personal and public, embraces concerns both economic and ergonomic, and is informed by many disciplines, including art and architecture, philosophy and ethics, literature and language, science and politics and performance.

Graphic design is everywhere, touching everything we do, everything we see, everything we buy: we see it on billboards and in Bibles, on taxi receipts and on websites, on birth certificates and on gift certificates, on the folded circulars inside jars of aspirin and on the thick pages of children's chubby board books.

Graphic design is the boldly directional arrows on street signs and the blurred, frenetic typography on the title sequence to E.R. It is the bright green logo for the New York Jets and the monochromatic front page of the Wall Street Journal. It is hang-tags in clothing stores, postage stamps and food packaging, fascist propaganda posters and brainless junk mail.

Graphic design is complex combinations of words and pictures, numbers and charts, photographs and illustrations that, in order to succeed, demands the clear thinking of a particularly thoughtful individual who can orchestrate these elements so they all add up to something distinctive, or useful, or playful, or surprising, or subversive or somehow memorable.

Graphic design is a popular art and a practical art, an applied art and an ancient art. Simply put, it is the art of visualizing ideas.

Pop Art

What do soup cans, comic strips, and paintings of hamburgers have in common? They are all subjects of a peculiar kind of art called pop art. Pop art doesn't have a secret, mysterious meaning like abstract art. Pop art is straightforward and fun.

Pop art started in the 1960s. Artists used the images that people knew well. After World War II, there were many new ads for more products than ever before. People were watching television. People were watching movies. The pop artists noticed this trend, and they used common objects in their art.

Before pop art, a lot of artists painted in abstract ways. They used geometric shapes in their pictures like cubes, cones, and circles. Pop artists got tired of abstract art. They thought it didn't mean anything. They wanted to paint objects that meant a lot to most people. They used lots of bright colors. Their art had a great sense of humor. It wasn't full of hidden meanings like abstract art. People understood what they saw, like a soup can, and just enjoyed it.

Universal design

Universal design is a process which yields products (devices, environments, systems, and processes) which are usable by and useful to the widest possi ble range of people. It is not possible, however, to create a product which is usable by everyone or under all circumsta nces. There are, for instance, people who simultaneously are deaf-blind, have cerebral palsy, and have severe cognitive impairments. We do not currently know how we would design a personal transportation system which could be independently used by an individual with such a combination of impairments. This is rather an extreme case, but it goes to make the point.

An equally important point, however, is the use of the word "currently" in the sentence above. Not long ago, it was not cle ar how we would create public computer-based information displays that were accessible to individuals who were deaf-blind. :Today, we do (as noted later), and it can be done in a way that does not add to the cost of manufacturing the system. In fact, base d on developments within just the last couple of years, it is possible to make products very widely usable and accessible that would not have been possible even a short time ago.