What is graphic design?
“Graphic design is the most ubiquitous of all the arts. It
responds to needs at once personal and public, embraces concerns
both economic and ergonomic, and is informed by many disciplines,
including art and architecture, philosophy and ethics, literature
and language, science and politics and performance.
HTML 5 accessible player with share button. This is the player we use on AIGA.org.
Graphic design is everywhere, touching everything we do,
everything we see, everything we buy: we see it on billboards and
in Bibles, on taxi receipts and on websites, on birth certificates
and on gift certificates, on the folded circulars inside jars of
aspirin and on the thick pages of children's chubby board
books.
Graphic design is the boldly directional arrows on street signs
and the blurred, frenetic typography on the title sequence to
E.R. It is the bright green logo for the New York Jets and
the monochromatic front page of the Wall Street Journal.
It is hang-tags in clothing stores, postage stamps and food
packaging, fascist propaganda posters and brainless junk mail.
Graphic design is complex combinations of words and pictures,
numbers and charts, photographs and illustrations that, in order to
succeed, demands the clear thinking of a particularly thoughtful
individual who can orchestrate these elements so they all add up to
something distinctive, or useful, or playful, or surprising, or
subversive or somehow memorable.
Graphic design is a popular art and a practical art, an applied
art and an ancient art. Simply put, it is the art of visualizing
ideas.”
- Jessica Helfand