From pictographs to pixels: a short history of graphic design
Graphic design is older than the written word. Here is how we got from cave walls to phone screens.
Graphic design has always been about one thing: communicating something visually, with pictures and symbols. Long before anyone wrote a sentence, people were designing.
Pictures before words
Some of the earliest surviving images, painted on the walls of caves such as Lascaux in France, are well over 15,000 years old. They were carefully composed: animals arranged across the rock, outlines chosen to suggest movement, natural pigments selected for colour. They were made to be seen and understood.
From pictures to letters
Design was so important to human development that, in some societies, pictographs became writing itself. Around five thousand years ago, Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs grew out of picture-signs. Later, early alphabets borrowed shapes from hieroglyphs to stand for sounds rather than things. Through the Phoenician, Greek and Latin alphabets, that idea eventually became the letters you are reading now. Every letter is, in a sense, a design that has been refined for thousands of years.
The printing press
In the fifteenth century, Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press in Mainz made it possible to reproduce text quickly and in quantity. Suddenly, decisions about typefaces, columns, margins and page layout mattered on a scale they never had before. Printers became the first professional typographers, and many of the conventions they established, such as justified columns, running heads and title pages, are still with us.
Posters and the age of advertising
Lithography, invented at the end of the eighteenth century, allowed images and lettering to be printed together in rich colour. By the late 1800s, city streets were filled with posters by artists such as Jules Chéret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Design had become a tool of commerce, competing for attention on every wall.
Graphic design becomes a profession
The term “graphic design” came into use in the early twentieth century. Movements such as the Bauhaus, and later the clean, grid-based Swiss style, treated design as a discipline with principles: clarity, hierarchy, structure and the purposeful use of type. Corporate identity programmes appeared, and advertising agencies, including the large New York agencies where Gustavo Woltmann later began his career, made design central to how companies spoke to the public.
Desktop publishing
In the mid-1980s, personal computers with graphical screens, page-layout software and laser printers changed everything again. Work that once required typesetters, paste-up boards and darkrooms could be done at a desk. The tools changed, but the fundamentals did not: a poor layout was still a poor layout, only now it could be produced faster.
The web
The World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee at the end of the 1980s, created an entirely new medium. Early websites were limited, often built with tables and images of text. As standards such as CSS matured, designers gained more control. Then smartphones arrived, and with them responsive design: layouts that adapt to any screen.
What has not changed
Comparing design today with design a hundred years ago is like comparing a rocket to the Wright brothers’ first flight. Yet the goal remains the one the cave painters had: to communicate visually. The human mind is still built to respond first to images, and the most powerful messages still combine images and words. The tools are only as good as the designer using them.
Read next: The elements of good design.