Graphic arts

Last updated April 21, 2024

A category of fine art, graphic art covers a broad range of visual artistic expression, typically two-dimensional, i.e. produced on a flat surface.^[1] The term usually refers to the arts that rely more on line, color or tone, especially drawing and the various forms of engraving;^[2] it is sometimes understood to refer specifically to printmaking processes,^[2] such as line engraving, aquatint, drypoint, etching, mezzotint, monotype, lithography, and screen printing (silk-screen, serigraphy).^[3] Graphic art mostly includes calligraphy, photography, painting, typography, computer graphics, and bindery. It also encompasses drawn plans and layouts for interior and architectural designs.^[1]

History

Throughout history, technological inventions have shaped the development of graphic art. In 2500 BC, the Egyptians used graphic symbols to communicate their thoughts in a written form known as hieroglyphics. The Egyptians wrote and illustrated narratives on rolls of papyrus to share the stories and art with others.^[4]

During the Middle Ages, scribes manually copied each individual page of manuscripts to maintain their sacred teachings. The scribes would leave marked sections of the page available for artists to insert drawings and decorations. Using art alongside the carefully lettered text enhanced the religious reading experience.^[5]

In 1450, Johannes Gutenberg created the first upgraded moving type mechanical equipment called as the printing press. His printing press aided the mass creation of text and visual art, eventually obviating the need for hand transcriptions.

Again during the Renaissance years, graphic art in the form of printing played a major role in the spread of classical learning in Europe. Within these manuscripts, book designers focused heavily on typeface.

Due to the development of larger fonts during the Industrial Revolution, posters became a popular form of graphic art used to communicate the latest information as well as to advertise the latest products and services.

The invention and popularity of film and television changed graphic art through the additional aspect of motion as advertising agencies attempted to use kinetics to their advantage.

The next major change in graphic arts came when the personal computer was invented in the twentieth century. Powerful computer software enables artists to manipulate images in a much faster and simpler way than the skills of board artists prior to the 1990s. With quick calculations, computers easily recolor, scale, rotate, and rearrange images if the programs are known.^[4]

The design of street signs has been impacted by scientific examinations into readability. New York City is in the midst of replacing all of its street signs that have all capital characters with ones that only have upper and lower case letters. They anticipate that greater readability will improve wayfinding and greatly reduce collisions and injuries.

Graphic design software

Graphic artists applying for positions in today's job market are expected to be familiar with computers and a variety of software programs to create the most appealing, up to date artworks.

Graphic art software includes applications such as:

Adobe Dreamweaver – a tool that facilitates the creation of webpages and dynamic internet content
Adobe Illustrator – a software application that allows artists to manipulate vector graphics
Adobe InDesign – desktop publishing software used for layout and design manipulation
Adobe Photoshop – a bitmap graphics software including powerful graphics editing tools that provide a large variety of editing functionality
CorelDRAW – similar to Adobe Illustrator, it is another vector graphic manipulation tool
PhotoImpact – a digital photograph editor
QuarkXPress – similar to Adobe InDesign, it is another computer publishing software tool
Affinity Photo - an alternative to Adobe Photoshop
Affinity Designer - an alternative to Adobe Illustrator

Free software

Paint.net – photograph editing capabilities with many plugins to expand use
GIMP – similar to paint.net and Photoshop
Inkscape – similar to Illustrator

Beside computers and software, graphic artists are also expected to be creative with processing camera work, registration, crop marks, and masking.^[5]

Careers

One of the most common career paths for a graphic artist is web design. With the popularity of the World Wide Web, the demand for web designers is immense. Graphic artists use their creativity with layouts, typography, and logos to market the products or services of the client's business. In addition to creating graphical designs, graphic artists also need to understand hypertext, web programming, and web page maintenance to successfully create a web page.^[5] The responsibility for effective communication also falls under the auspices of the graphic designer.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graphic design</span> Interdisciplinary branch of design and of the fine arts

Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdisciplinary branch of design and of the fine arts. Its practice involves creativity, innovation and lateral thinking using manual or digital tools, where it is usual to use text and graphics to communicate visually.

Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editing. Owing to its fame, the program's name has become genericised as a verb although Adobe disapproves of such use.

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spacing, and spaces between pairs of letters. The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. Typography also may be used as an ornamental and decorative device, unrelated to the communication of information.

A vector graphic editor is a computer program that enables its users to create, compose and edit images with the use of mathematical and geometrical commands rather than individual pixels. This software is used in creating high-definition vector graphic images that can be scaled indefinitely without losing their quality. The output is saved in vector graphic formats, such as EPS, ODG, or SVG.

Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using dedicated software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online content. Desktop publishing software can generate page layouts and produce text and image content comparable to the simpler forms of traditional typography and printing. This technology allows individuals, businesses, and other organizations to self-publish a wide variety of content, from menus to magazines to books, without the expense of commercial printing.

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design software developed and marketed by Adobe. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud, Illustrator CC was released. The latest version, Illustrator 2024, was released on October 10, 2023, and is the 28th generation in the product line. Adobe Illustrator was reviewed as the best vector graphics editing program in 2021 by hpMagazine.

An illustrator is an artist who specializes in enhancing writing or elucidating concepts by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text or idea. The illustration may be intended to clarify complicated concepts or objects that are difficult to describe textually, which is the reason illustrations are often found in children's books.

Graphics are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of data, as in design and manufacture, in typesetting and the graphic arts, and in educational and recreational software. Images that are generated by a computer are called computer graphics.

Digital painting is an art medium created with computer technologies. It employs pixels which are assigned a color to create imagery. It is also known as raster graphics. It is called digital painting because it initially distinguished itself from vector graphics in its ability to render gradiated or blended colors in imagery which mimicked traditional drawing and painting media.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital illustration</span> Use of digital tools to produce images under an artists direction

Digital illustration or computer illustration is the use of digital tools to produce images under the direct manipulation of the artist, usually through a pointing device such as a graphics tablet or, less commonly, a mouse. It is distinguished from computer-generated art, which is produced by a computer using mathematical models created by the artist. It is also distinct from digital manipulation of photographs, in that it is an original construction "from scratch". Photographic elements such as background or texture may be incorporated into such works, but they are not necessarily the primary basis.

Motion graphic design, also known as motion design, is a subset of graphic design which combines design with animation and/or filmmaking, video production, and filmic techniques. Examples include kinetic typography and graphics used in film and television opening sequences, and station identification logos of some television channels.

A number of vector graphics editors exist for various platforms. Potential users of these editors will make a comparison of vector graphics editors based on factors such as the availability for the user's platform, the software license, the feature set, the merits of the user interface (UI) and the focus of the program. Some programs are more suitable for artistic work while others are better for technical drawings. Another important factor is the application's support of various vector and bitmap image formats for import and export.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Page layout</span> Part of graphic design that deals in the arrangement of visual elements on a page

In graphic design, page layout is the arrangement of visual elements on a page. It generally involves organizational principles of composition to achieve specific communication objectives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graphic art software</span> Subclass of application software

Graphic art software is a subclass of application software used for graphic design, multimedia development, stylized image development, technical illustration, general image editing, or simply to access graphic files. Art software uses either raster or vector graphic reading and editing methods to create, edit, and view art.

Graphic design careers include creative director, art director, art production manager, brand identity developer, illustrator and layout artist.

Serif (Europe) Ltd is a British developer and publisher of software. It provides software and associated products direct to customers through its website and contact centre in the United Kingdom, and through retailers. The company was acquired by Canva in March of 2024.

Aaron Marcus is an American user-interface and information-visualization designer, as well as a computer graphics artist.

Adobe FreeHand was a computer application for creating two-dimensional vector graphics oriented primarily to professional illustration, desktop publishing and content creation for the Web. FreeHand was similar in scope, intended market, and functionality to Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW and Xara Designer Pro. Because of FreeHand's dedicated page layout and text control features, it also compares to Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress. Professions using FreeHand include graphic design, illustration, cartography, fashion and textile design, product design, architects, scientific research, and multimedia production.

Print design, a subset of graphic design, is a form of visual communication used to convey information to an audience through intentional aesthetic design printed on a tangible surface, designed to be printed on paper, as opposed to presented on a digital platform. A design can be considered print design if its final form was created through an imprint made by the impact of a stamp, seal, or dye on the surface of the paper.

References

1 2 "Graphic art." Encyclopædia Britannica. Britannica.com. Retrieved 21 February 2016.
1 2 "Graphic art." The Oxford Dictionary of Art. 3rd ed. Ed. Ian Chilvers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 309.
↑ Mayer, Ralph (1992). "Graphic arts, or graphics." The HarperCollins Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques. 2nd ed. Revised and edited by Steven Sheehan. New York: Harper Perennial. p. 182.
1 2 Meggs, Philip B. (5 March 2014). "Graphic design". Encyclopædia Britannica. Britannica.com. Retrieved 21 February 2016.
1 2 3 McGuire-Lyle, Erin. Careers in the Graphic Arts and Computer Graphics (Career Resource Library). June 2000. New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 1999.

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[Britannica-1] 1 2 "Graphic art." Encyclopædia Britannica. Britannica.com. Retrieved 21 February 2016.

[Oxford-2] 1 2 "Graphic art." The Oxford Dictionary of Art. 3rd ed. Ed. Ian Chilvers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 309.

[3] Mayer, Ralph (1992). "Graphic arts, or graphics." The HarperCollins Dictionary of Art Terms and Techniques. 2nd ed. Revised and edited by Steven Sheehan. New York: Harper Perennial. p. 182.

[Meggs-4] 1 2 Meggs, Philip B. (5 March 2014). "Graphic design". Encyclopædia Britannica. Britannica.com. Retrieved 21 February 2016.

[McGuire-Lytle-5] 1 2 3 McGuire-Lyle, Erin. Careers in the Graphic Arts and Computer Graphics (Career Resource Library). June 2000. New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 1999.

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