Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “We are not makers of history. We are made by history.” 

Over the centuries, graphic design has evolved. From Babylonian inscriptions pressed into wet clay and Egyptian hieroglyphs carved into temple walls to Figma files, it is like watching a beautiful design come together, one layer at a time. Our ancestors etched designs and graphics onto cave walls thousands of years ago to fulfil the true role of design: communication. When paper was first invented in China, designs became more readily available, and woodblock printing eventually followed. Slowly, typography and art started to come together, laying the foundation for the designs we see today. Gutenberg’s printing press, around 1450, was a revolutionary advancement for the rapid spread of designs and text, reaching the masses, which is the most important objective of graphic design. Technology kept advancing, from lithography in the 1790s to the steam-powered printing press in the early 1800s and then to offset printing, which made mass production faster, cheaper and sharper.

But more than the development of new technologies, the development of new thoughts, thinking outside the frame, matters in graphic design. Designers started developing new styles to convey their thoughts in changing times. Of the many art styles that have emerged over the years, a few are worthy of note. The interpretive form of expression we all appreciate in design today owes much to the Art Nouveau movement of the late 19th century, with its flowing lines and nature-inspired lettering. Various movements followed, ultimately leading to the Bauhaus movement, founded by Walter Gropius in Germany in 1919, which embraced minimalism, geometric shapes, and simple, new typefaces. This movement has helped form the basis of modern graphic design. Around the same time came the De Stijl movement of primary colours and squares and the Art Deco movement of bold symmetry and distinct sets of three. But while graphic design existed for centuries, the term itself was first coined in 1922 by William A. Dwiggins in his article “New Kind of Printing Calls for New Design”. Design today is used for advertising, and corporate branding was revolutionised by Paul Rand, who helped some of America’s biggest corporations, including IBM, UPS and ABC, shape their brand identities with logos. His marks were so well drawn that they still look fresh decades later.

Graphic design as we know it today uses a multitude of advanced platforms. It took off with Photoshop in 1990, which was used to build professional designs by the masses, and suddenly “undo” became a designer’s best friend. Microsoft Paint, which shipped with the first version of Windows in 1985, was also a simple tool the design populace could use, even if the results were not always masterpieces. The journey of graphic design ever since has been wonderful. After Framer came out in 2014 and Figma in 2016, graphic design became a discipline many practice today, from changing thoughts and ideas to UI/UX. It surrounds us and changes the way we experience the world. And the graphic designers of the past, our ancestors who once designed without knowing it, laid the foundation for the pixels of today.

– Nikunj Kohli