An Online Graphic Design Blog About Graphics, Layout and Design, Graphics Software, DTP, and Graphic Design Resources on the Net.

Brief History of Graphic Design
by Bharat Bista

The very first written word of mankind was the beginning of Graphic Design! And its native land was none other then ancient caves and caverns! The very first symbol they had sketched through cave drawings, paintings, markings on boulders, bone, and ivory are the foremost indication and evidence where graphic design was born, nursed, nourished and grown! Nevertheless, the term Graphic Design was named by William Addison Dwiggins in the early 20th Century.

Anthropologists studying prehistoric periods on cave paintings leads us earlier than the Upper Paleolithic period from 40,000 - 10,000 B.C., where our ancestors were learning how to design signs and symbols that could be communicated visually; moreover they were successful on leaving their marks. The pioneers of graphic design are non other then our own ancestors, who had lived in the caves and sketched their drawing on rocks. History of graphics design roots to our own ancestors of ancient era where civilization was cultured in caves, and left their drawings and sketches for us on their canvas of cave walls and ceilings.

The earliest drawings known today are from 6,000 years ago, are that of carved stone and pottery containers. Drawings contained in Egyptian pyramids with signs, symbols and letters are known to all and it leads us back 5000 years.

Furthermore, from 600-250 BC evolution on geometrical shape and structures in Europe played a major role for the development of designing and sketching. As an applied art of arranging images and text for an attempt of visual communication; the hand written copy of the Christian Bible “The Book of Kells”, created by Irish monks in 9th century AD with rich illustrations is a good example of the evolution of graphic design.

Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, a German metal-worker and an inventor, introduced a printing technology allowing the re-use of individual letters. The first book produced by Gutenberg press was “The Incunabula”. This book became the standard in the history of book printing and publishing and was a giant leap for printing and publication; though, block stamping on sheets of paper with text and signs carved, was in use in Europe and Asia long before 14th century; however, Graphic design of this era was formatting and we today have named it Old Style graphic design.

Guttenberg era of graphic design evolution was sluggish, until the 19th century, in Britain the division created between fine art and applied art boosted this evolution, and they successfully published some of the most major graphic design products through the Arts movement. William Morris made a great deal of business of publishing books with stylish printings and contributed a significant role to attract the potential market as well as commercializing graphic design; in addition he was the pioneer for the separation of commercial design and fine arts.

…nbsp;Another painter from the19th century was Piet Mondrian whose innovation has greatly influenced today’s modern graphic designer. Though he was not a graphic designer, his uses of grids was the origin of modern day advertisement known as the grid system; widely used by graphic designer of our century today.

With the decadence of classical style, modern graphic design engrossed in the early 20th century with designs influenced by fine arts. The trademark of early modern fonts is the sans-serif typeface. In 1928, the book “New Typography” written by Jan Tschichold systemized the philosophy of modern typography.

Furthermore, the fathers of modern graphic design are still considered to be typographers such as Herbert Bayer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and El Lissitzky as they broke new ground on typography building techniques and stylizing. Modern computer technology has changed typography production altogether, but for the experimental and evolutionary approach their contribution was highly recognizable.

The booming and flourishing period for graphic design was after World War II; as the American economy thrived, the demand of graphic design, particularly on advertisement and packaging sectors blossomed.

I Love NY ad campaign (1973) and a famous Bob Dylan poster (1968) designed by Milton Glaser are examples of applied graphic design culture and its influence. Progressions in graphic design in the early 20th Century were mostly enthused by technological expansion in printing and also in photography. But at the mid of this century, the raising of the computer era in graphic design has faced little backwards as early computers were far weaker and computer memory was limited. However, within the end of this century with the immense development of computers and its corresponding technologies, modern graphic design has evolved into a business that is done almost entirely on computers.

In mid 1980, the arrival of desktop publishing and the launching of software applications like Illustrator and PageMaker introduced an era of designers to computer image manipulation and 3D image creation. Computer graphic design facilitates instantaneous effects of layout or typography changes.

Today, graphic design the visual communication, is yielded in the rich soil of computer ground, fertilized with latest hardware and software technologies. Graphic designers worldwide plough through computers loaded with the latest gadgets and gizmos, software and hardware, academic and technology, information and communication, and are generating the new history of graphic design in their design laboratories.

With express elevation of the hi-tech industry, the future assures more and today’s designer are contributing their name and effort through their creativity for the next generation. History yet has to write all of her pages for new innovation and invention in this field.

Author: Bharat Bista

Bharat Bista may be contacted at bharatbista@gmail.com.

Comments(0)

Some Graphic design and Prepress tips for Photoshop users

Here are some “must-know” tips for CG people who decide to start doing some pre-press and design for printing. As beginner you have to know that design for printing has some differences than web design or other screen designs.

Always use CMYK
First of all, printing technology uses CMYK color description and screen design use RGB. CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow blacK) is used because of printing technology that uses these 4 colors to make picture on paper. This color model is for Reflective surfaces. RGB (Red Green Blue) is for self-lighted surfaces, like screens and TVs.
If you have photos or illustrations in RGB, always convert them using Photoshop’s Image > Mode menu, because Adobe Photoshop gives best result with minimum changes of colors. CorelDRAW, for instance, gives totally different colors if you export drawing to RGB or CMYK. In my opinion, if you have to use some design elements from CorelDRAW, export them in RGB and then convert in CMYK using Photoshop.

Black should be only 100%K, not composite from all colors
You have to keep in mind that printing process has minimum 4 passes (to print full color – in Offset technology), and that alignment of these four passes may not be 100% same. Every pass is one color. So if you make text from 100C 100M 100Y 100K composite, you will have noise at letter’s edges. Photoshop has habit to form black from all composites so pay attention to select only pure black (0C 0M 0Y 100K) when you write text.

Use minimum 300DPI for Offset and 600DPI for Digital printings
Human eye can easily notice granulation of image raster if its resolution is lower than 96 DPI. Common Offset printing plates (machines) support 300DPI, so use this quality and make design in that resolution. Also, some digital printers support more dots per inch so you can make design from 600 to 1200 DPI’s, but it is very hard to notice difference between 600 DPI and higher. In special cases if you make design for buildboard, you can use 30 DPI, because of view distance.

Clean up small composite values
Keep in mind that every colored surface is made from these 4 components mentioned before. If you have on some surface less then 10% of some color, it is better to modify that color component to 0% in order to avoid edge noise. You will make small change on color. Also if you try to print 5% of some composite it is very small chance that something will be printed at all on Offset printing.
Example: if you fill background with gray color: 5C 5M 5Y 5K you will probably bet totally white surface, but, if you use 0C 0M 0Y 11K, which gives very similar color on screen, you will have some gray color on background.
Simply, printing and screening technologies are different

Make from 3 to 5 mm bleed on every edge that should be trimmed
Printing surface is always bigger than required dimensions. When you do screen design you don’t think about cutting, because it doesn’t exist on screen, but, when you do design for paper you have to keep in mind that someone will have to cut edges of your design. So there is Trimmed dimensions and Not-Trimmed. As designer you are thinking in trimmed dimensions, but when you send file on printing you have to make tolerance in case that swings that cuts paper to fit required dimensions make mistake, and, it always make some mistake. If you don’t make your design bigger you will have white stripes at edges of your catalogue or flyer.

Keep in mind that US print shops use the English system religiously. In case you
didn’t know, points and picas come from the English system, and its much easier for us to use all of our technology with those measurements. The bleed (that’s the area of excess design to allow for cutting) is always 1/8″ or less depending on the room on the plates.

In case of flyer, you have to make this bleed for all edges, in case of catalogue, only outer edges should have this because, edge that comes to bending line doesn’t have cutting.

Make margins at least 5mm
All elements of design and all texts should be at least 5mm from edge of cut. I tried with 3mm, it was bad looking because on some places distance was smaller because problem of swings. In some cases you can go up to 10mm of margin.

That is something that I noticed that beginners in graphic design should know. There is also some pure design tips about contrasts and colors, but I’ll leave it for some other tutorial.

Use TIFF as final file format
I advise you to use TIFF format when you send design to printer company. I had cooperation with many printing companies and printing professionals and everybody agree that TIFF / CMYK is most trusted image format for color-safe exporting and transporting from design workstation to film exposition company.

It is safe to use: LZW compression (more compatible) or ZIP compression (less compatible). For final file you can discard layers to reduce file size. Skilled print workers reported that ZIP compression may lead to corruption later on in the process of printing, also that LZW compression is not allowed by some applications (Heidelburg).

Check http://www.omnetwork.net for more tutorials covering this and other design topics.

About author:
Goran Grubic is skilled print and web designer from Serbia running design portal omnetwork.net (http://www.omnetwork.net) which offers for free large unique tutorial library (covering Photoshop, Flash, 3D Studio, Dreamweaver and similar topics), free graphic resources (templates, elements, 3D models etc.), photography (free&royalty free, just use it!) and sounds&music loops for multimedia web development.

Comments(0)