Category Archives: Graphic Design

The History of Graphic Design – part 1

The term graphic design can refer to a number of artistic and professional disciplines which focus on visual communication and presentation. Various methods are used to create and combine symbols, images and / or words to create a visual representation of ideas and messages. A graphic designer may use typography, visual arts and page layout techniques to produce the final result. Graphic Design often refers to both the process by which the communication is created and the products which are produced.

Typical uses of graphic design include magazines, advertisements and product packaging. For example, a package might include a logo or other artwork, organized text and pure design elements such as shapes and color which unify the piece. The composition is one of the most important features of the graphics, particularly when using the pre-existing materials, or different elements.

While the graphic as a style it has a relatively recent history, graphic design-like activities go beyond the history of mankind: From the Lascaux cave to the Trajan’s Column in Rome, the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages and the dazzling Ginza neon lights.

So in the long history as well as in the relatively recent explosion of visual communication in the 20th and 21st century there is often a blurred distinction and consistency of advertising art, Graphic Design and fine arts. Ultimately, they share many of the same elements, theories, principles, practices and languages and sometimes the same benefactor or client. In advertising the ultimate objective is the sale of goods and services. In graphic design, what matters is to give order in information, form to ideas, expression and feeling to artifacts that indicate the human experience.

The advent of printing

During the dynasty of Tang (618-906) between the 4th and 7th century AD, logs where cut (raw marks) to print on textiles and later to reproduce Buddhist texts. A Buddhist scripture printed in 868 is the first known printed book. In the early 11th century, longer scrolls and books were produced using movable type printing making books widely available during the dynasty of Song. Sometime time near 1450, the Gutenberg printing press made ​​books widely available in Europe. The design of the book of Aldus Manutius developed the book structure which would become the foundation of western publishing project. This era of Graphic Design is called Humanitarian or Old School.

Click to continue reading…

The History of Graphic Design – part 2

Continuing…

Emergence of the design industry

In late 19th century Europe, especially in the United Kingdom, the stream began to separate graphic design from fine arts. The Piet Mondrian is known as the father of Graphic Design. He was a servant of the arts, and his use of networks inspired modern network system currently used in advertising, print and web layout.

The 1849 o Henry Cole was one of the greatest forces in design education in Great Britain, informing the government about the importance of design in his Journal of Design and Construction. He organized the Great Exhibition as a celebration of modern industrial technology and Victorian design. From 1981 to 1896 William Morris’ Kelmscott Press published books that are some of the most important graphic design products of the movement of the arts and arts practice and made a very lucrative business of creating books of great stylistic and refinement sold to the rich. The Morris proved that a market existed for jobs in Graphic Design and helped highlight the separation of design from production and the arts. The work of the Kelmscott Press is characterized by the persistence of the historical styles (genres). This historicism, however, was significant, as was meant to be the first significant reaction to the outdated state of graphic design in the 19th century. The work of Morris along with the rest of the Private Press movement, directly influenced Art Nouveau and is indirectly responsible for the development of graphic design in the early 20th century, in general..

The graphic design of the 20th century

Who coined the term “ Graphic Design” seems to cause a conflict. It has been attributed to Richard Guyatt, the British designer and academic, but another source suggests William Addison Dwiggins, an American book designer in the early 20th century. The marking on the London Subway is a classic example of design of the modern times and used a font designed by Edward Johnston in 1916. In the 1920s, Soviet constructivism applied the ‘intellectual production’ in different areas of production. The movement saw individualistic art as useless in revolutionary Russia and thus moved towards creating objects for utilitarian purposes. They designed buildings, theater presentations, posters, textiles, clothing, furniture, logos, menus, etc. C Jan Tschichold codified the principles of modern typography in his 1928 book The New Typography. He later condemned the philosophy adopted in this book as a fascist, but remained very influential.

Click to continue reading…

The History of Graphic Design – part 3

Continuing…

Printers that are influenced by Tschichold and the Bauhaus school, such as Herbert Bayer and o Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and El Lissitzky are the fathers of Graphic Design as we know it today. Imported production techniques and stylistic devices used throughout the 20th century. The following years they saw graphic design of modern style to gain widespread acceptance and application. An explosive postwar American economy established a greater need for graphic design, mainly for advertising and packaging.

Migration from the German Bauhaus school of design to Chicago in 1937 brought a mass minimalism production to America, sparking a wild fire between modern architecture and design. Notable names in mid century modern design include Adrian Frutiger, designer of the typefaces Univers & Frutiger, Paul Rand, which from the late 1930s until his death in 1996, took the principles of Bauhaus and applied them to popular advertising and logo design, helping to create a unique American approach to European minimalism while becoming one of the main promoters of the subset of Graphic Design known as corporate identity and Josef Müller-Brockmann, who designed posters in a serious but more reachable way, typical of the 1950s and 1970s period.

Applications

From road signs to technical schematics, from commercial properties’ memos to reference manuals, graphic design enhances transfer of knowledge. Legibility is enhanced by improving the visual presentation of the text. The design can also assist in the sale of a product or idea through effective visual communication. Graphic design is applied to products and elements of company identity like logos, colors, packaging, and text. Together, these are defined as distinctive product (brand). These are becoming increasingly important for the range of services that can be provided by many graphic designers, alongside corporate identity.

Click to continue reading…

The History of Graphic Design – part 4

Continuing…

While the terms are often used indiscriminately, the brand is more closely associated with the trade mark or trade name of a product or service, given that corporate identity can have a broader meaning relating to the structure and ethos of the company and the external image. Graphic designers will often form a team working on corporate identity and brand work.

Other members of this group may be marketing professionals, communications consultants and commercial writers. Manuals are designed to present subjects such as geography, science and mathematics. These versions have provisions which illustrate theories and diagrams. A common example of graphics is used for training are diagrams of the human anatomy. The graphics, in addition is applied to layout and formatting of educational material to make information more accessible and understandable to read. Graphic design is applied in the entertainment industry in decoration, scenery and visual narrative stories. Other examples of Graphic Design for entertainment purposes include novels, comic books, titles, start and end credits in movies and programs. This could also include artwork used for t-shirts and other types of screen print for sale.

From scientific journals to news reports, the presentation of opinion and facts is often illustrated with graphics and thoughtful compositions of visual information – known as information design. The newspapers, magazines, blogs, television and film documentaries may use Graphic Design to information and entertainment. With the advent of the internet, information designers with experience in interactive tools such as Adobe Flash are increasingly being used to illustrate the history of news.

Training

A graphic design work may include the formulation and presentation of existing text and either preexisting images or images developed by the graphic designer. For example, a newspaper story begins with the journalists and photojournalists and then becomes the graphic designer’s job to organize the page into a reasonable layout and determine if it should be required other graphical elements.

Click to continue reading…

The History of Graphic Design – part 5

Continuing…

In a magazine article or advertisement, often the graphic designer or art director will commission photographers or illustrators to create original pieces just to be incorporated into the design layout. Contemporary design practice has been extended to the modern computer, for example in the use of WYSIWYG user interfaces, often referred to as interactive design, or multimedia design.

Visual Arts

To be able to implement a plan of any graphical elements, they must come from within visual art skills. These graphics are often (but not always) developed by a graphic designer. Visual arts include works which are primarily visual in nature using anything from traditional media to the photo or art produced by a computer. The principles of Graphic Design can be applied to each graphic art element individually, and the final composition.

Typography

Typography is the art, skill and technical writing design, modifying characters writing and organizing. These signs (characters) are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The setting of writing is the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, line spacing and letter spacing. The printing is done by typesetters, composers, typographers, graphic designers, art directors and secretarial staff. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization extended typography to new generations of visual designers and amateurs.

Page Layout

The page layout is the part of graphic design on the setting and the style of processing elements (content) on a page. Starting from the first illuminated pages in hand copies of books of the Middle Ages and proceeding to complex modern magazine, and the provisions lists, proper planning of a page, it has long been under investigation in the literature. In print media, elements usually consist of writing, images and occasionally graphic depicting space for items that are not printed with ink such as cutting blade or laser seals or embossed print for the blind (the so-called Braille writing).

The 10 Commandments of Graphic Design Arts – part 1

1. Thou shall not forget fonts

One of the most common mistakes you can do is to deliver a prepress department a work, which does not contain the fonts used in the document. Let’s not forget that there are (and reasonable) design studios and advertising agencies who prefer to outsource their colored corrections and insertions of the final high-resolution images in their final work in a studio of Graphic Design. Hence, the need for delivery of open archives on specific workflows is justified.

Also, many times young designers deliver open work to have confidence that a more experienced eye will prevent an error before printing. In any such case, you must either manually or automatically, the document to be accompanied by all fonts used in it.

If you do not use a pager, but a drawing program, then again we can see from the context menu how many and what fonts are used and we pack them manually.

A final solution is to convert all text in linear contours. In every way and means therefore, we must ensure that when our work is open to external partner, will remain unchanged. The only barrier to an open theme file is copyrighted fonts. If you have questions or doubts about this, you are advised to contact the firm that designed of your fonts.

Even when we talk about a closed file, either eps or pdf, we must ensure the integration of our fonts in generated file. Every software that respects itself gives the user that possibility.

2. Thou shall not lose the chromatic joints

Color Trapping or otherwise color assembling is a very large and important section of Graphic Design. This phenomenon is caused either by pressure or the tension exerted on the paper from the rollers, the absorbency… Click to continue reading…

The 10 Commandments of Graphic Design Arts – part 2

Continuing… of the paper, shocks and vibrations, whether the line is in 2, 4 or 5 towers, the print speed, the type of printing, the production of films etc. Of course during its production, this is to some extent controlled.

Production runs and grows as print speed increases with distance from the offset sheet and pass in cylindrical, flexography and rotogravure, depending on the paper stock and the use of margins mismatch of color rising. This phenomenon results in surfaces which are covered with pure colors, sometimes leaving blank spaces between them and other times one color to the other agent presses impurities.

Speaking of pure colors, we mean first of all the four colors CMYK in clean but overlapping areas (e.g. only cyan or magenta). What we call color splicing is a technology that allows us to predict the areas that this phenomenon may happen and cause us a controlled and stable blend of pure colors in very thin zones. This essentially creates a trapping zone of colors which will deviate from normal surfaces.

The assembly can occur automatically or manually by the software we use with special arrangements or by the Graphic Design studio we work with.

In terms of studio, talking about In Rip Trapping when the software used for the ripping of our work has integrated or separate module specifically for assembly. If not the case, a workaround is to integrate third party software to perform trap color procedures.

But there are many cases fitting to be made by the same designer. The most traditional of these is the use of black and pure pantone inks. For example, you should seriously think about how to deal with black lettering or black line drawings on a spot photos or backgrounds. … Click to continue reading…

The 10 Commandments of Graphic Design Arts – part 3

Continuing…

3. Thou shall remember the CMYK color model

Another very serious problem is the tradition of open or closed files with forgotten RGB files. Beware, for there is no misunderstanding, to make something clear from the beginning. It’s a different thing the accidental RGB images integration in a document where everything else is CMYK and another thing the pre-planned workflow based entirely on RGB photos.

Once we have decided to deliver a record of all lines and images in CMYK, we have to check our records before sending it to pre-press. Checking mechanisms in such cases are too many in all programs. We again propose if you do not know how, to read carefully the instructions of the software or ask your colleagues. The professional layout programs provide, at any time, the ability to control all of the contents of document files. The same happens during files exit for packing and shipping as open. Also Graphic Design programs can give us information on the types of files they contain. But even if we close our work in pdf, we can through Acrobat Pro to do a pre print control, a preflight of our work.

It is not only the problem of RGB images that should concern us, but how to do the black and white images, how to convert an RGB image to CMYK, i.e. what percentage of black, what GCR and UCR.

4. Thou shall not match different picture extensions

When we talk about layout in Photoshop? When we talk about setting up a book in Microsoft Word? When one obtains gif image files from Internet at 72 dpi and animation? Make a trip in a studio, sit a couple of hours and you will see …

There is a very specific set of file types used in Graphic Design and these are pdf, eps, ai, cdr, qxd, ind, tiff, psd, jpeg. It is not the gif, or the picts, nor bmp, nor wmf, or what we find on Internet at super-low resolution and we want to do it 500% magnification. … Click to continue reading…