In this section we will outline:
- How graphic designers create imagery
- The distinction between commercial art and graphic design
- Different sorts of imagery and what it does
While early moveable type may have been the starting point of typography, over time all manner of other material comes into the graphic design fold, including printing, photography and digital imagery and screen graphics. Of course, predating anything so mechanical or electronic is hand-drawn imagery such as illustration, cursive script, painting and sketching.
‘Just like with the hundreds of thousands of typefaces or ways of making words, there are dozens and dozens of ways of making pictures,’ explains graphic design Quentin Newark. ‘You can use icons, you can use drawings, you can use photography, and photography these days can be manipulated to achieve all kinds of different end results. You can reference the world of art, you can use historical archive material, you can generate your own images. So there is no single way of making images, or using images.'
Dylan Poster illustrated by graphic designer Milton Glaser. Photograph of David Bowie on his Heathen album cover designed by Jonathan Barnbrook
Designer Neville Brody argues that it is through the production and use of images that you can trace the development of what many of us now understand to be graphic design. 19th century illustrator, painter and printer Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was an early graphic designer says Brody because he was an artist whose work was commercial and intended to be reproduced many times. ‘In a way it comes back to the origin of what you call graphic design. If you go back to someone like Toulouse-Lautrec, he is not only heading the business, getting the client brief, figuring out the context, the research and the understanding and going away and doing the drawing – but also doing the main printing and presumably delivering [the work] back as well. From those small beginnings, we have the concept of what we could call a commercial artist,’ says Brody.
Ambassadeurs: Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret poster designed by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec 1892
And Newark traces this practice of illustrating an idea with pictures as well as words through the 20th Century when acclaimed graphic designers like Milton Glaser demonstrated that visual communication was as much about imagery as it was about words, into the 21st Century where we continue to see illustration leading in much visual communication.
‘Illustration, if you want to be specific about that word, is one aspect of image making, or picture making,’ says Newark. ‘Some graphic designers are indistinguishable from illustrators. So a graphic designer like Milton Glaser or Seymour Chwast, they are illustrators who also practice graphic design. And a good more recent example is somebody like Paul Davis who makes drawings, but also makes his drawings speak, so he uses words and language, thought bubbles, speech bubbles, and is a very capable designer in his own right. I mean, he’s designed books and certainly from the way he manipulates and places his drawings, he’s much more than just an image maker.’
Lorry tarpaulin illustrated for bag maker Freitag by Chris Gray 2008
Illustration has become a very popular element in much consumer branding–related graphic design over the past few years. This is partly a result of corporations’ desires to play down connotations of impersonal and mercenary globalisation: illustration is a very ‘human’ and personal form of visual communication. It’s also partly a result of the fact that designer-illustrators are embracing typography in their work, according to designer and writer Adrian Shaughnessy. This creates a ‘new seductive messaging that combines the directness of typography with the sensory appeal of illustration, pattern and form-making’, he writes in Eye magazine.
It is the job of the graphic designer to select, develop and structure imagery, typography, colour palettes, layouts, paper stock, printing techniques and overall graphic styles in a way that helps their client achieve a desired effect. Depending on the nature of the project, the designer and the client, this process might allow for free artistic expression or it might be tightly anchored to commercial imperatives. In many cases, it is precisely the tension between these two approaches which produces the best and most effective work.
Find out more about different types of illustrations
Information graphics
From Isotype
http://www.gerdarntz.org/content/gerd-arntz#isotype
The International System Of TYpographic Picture Education (Isotype) was developed by the Viennese social scientist and philosopher Otto Neurath (1882-1945) as a method for visual statistics. Gerd Arntz was the designer tasked with making Isotype’s pictograms and visual signs. Eventually, Arntz designed around 4000 such signs, which symbolized keydata from industry, demographics, politics and economy.
From Otl Aicher
http://www.1972municholympics.co.uk/
Cartoons
Pictoplasma
Contemporary character design for branding, kitsch or urban art.
http://pictoplasma.com/
Cognitive media
http://cognitivemedia.co.uk/
Scribing is a useful method for engaging people by using an interesting and explanatory visual tool to develop, design, understand and communicate complex information.