Introduction
Graphic design serves as a visual representation of every digital and physical product through the combination of images, fonts, and colors. It holds an important position in modern advertising, branding, web and editorial design, packaging, and in many other areas.
The idea to explore the history of graphic design as a part of this lab was inspired by visiting MoMA where I saw the image most popular in 1925 font. This area of study became of interest to me because I wanted to learn more about early graphic design artworks rooted in the very origins to see the progress of development.
The timeline presents key moments of the graphic design history with visual elements and a brief description. Following the history of presented points, readers can notice that some of the techniques used in the early 90s are still actively used and remain popular in some of the modern works.
Materials & Methods
The “Graphic design never stops evolving – even as we talk about it right now” article and the “Graphic design history: past, present, and future” book by Teal Triggs were used as the main source of information about events in the history of graphic design since 1906. Google Images, Moma, and Whitney websites were used as sources of images.
TimelineJS open-source tool along with Google Spreadsheet was used to visualize the main chronological events of graphic design history. All the dates, events, brief descriptions, and JPG images links were pasted into appropriate columns of Google Spreadsheet which were published to the web to make the timeline publicly available. The TimelineJS preview tool was used in the process of building a timeline to monitor incorporated changes.
Results
The history of graphic design timeline
Key points of the history of graphic design from 1906 to 2000s were described. The timeline included 10 events with images illustrating the style of graphic design:
- 1906 – Xerox
- 1910 – Expressionism Graphics
- 1920 – Mass Digital Media Evolution
- 1925 – New Typography Introduction
- 1930 – Art Deco
- 1945 – Late Modernism
- 1950 – Pop Art
- 1975 – Postmodern Graphic Design
- 1990 – The Introduction Of Photoshop 1.0
- 2000 – Modern Graphic Design
Exploring the history of graphic design and putting main events into the chronological sequence helped me to better understand current trends and investigate the correlation between main historical events and direction of graphic design.
Reflection & Further direction
Working in this lab, I found TimelineJS an easy-to-use tool that allows users to create an interactive timeline without programming skills. Another useful feature is an opportunity to embed created visualization on the website or share it with friends. It also doesn’t require users to create an account and sign in. Furthermore, it supports multiple media formats such as images, Google maps, social media posts, video, audio files and others.
However, the tool has some limitations such as inflexibility of designing elements, alignment and fonts. Automatic contrast text-background adjustment also doesn’t work well for light colors creating dark font shadow.
Working further with the TimelineJS I would be interested to explore CSS tags application which allows to alleviate tool limitations and customize the timeline to present key artists within the same time frame.
Sources
Triggs, Teal (2011). Graphic design history: past, present, and future. Design Issues, 27 (1). pp. 3-6. ISSN 07479360/15314790
Google Spreadsheet: https://www.google.com/sheets/about/
Timeline JS, https://timeline.knightlab.com/#preview-embed
“Graphic design never stops evolving – even as we talk about it right now”, https://geek.design/graphic-design-timeline/
Whitney Museum of American Art, https://whitney.org/
Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/