In 1901, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote “The art and craft of the machine”, in the search to look for new ways to express themselves, artists like Wright, Mcdonald, and Hoffman devoted their time to pin down their art and work in decor, products, books, postures and banners; it was a movement of expression that later gained massive popularity. Thanks to this movement in the beginning of the century, there was a surge of new creative design that has never been seen before in that era. The time also faced the WW1 which also had armies and nations using these arts and designs for the first time in critical movements to influence decision making, ideologies and propaganda.

Design movement was very popular in the roaring twenties and people started to take notice of the word design and graphics, unseen photos have been circulating and many schools of thought have also started to emerge such as the formalism and constructivism movement in Russia, as well as realism in the US. Schools of thought have started to emerge such as the early Bauhaus in Germany which in turn produced a lot of imagery that is very popular even today.

The term graphic design did not appear until 1922 by the William Addison Dwiggins which was meant to describe the management of visuals. Magazines were also known for their new creative designs such as Vogue, Fortune, and Bazaar. Advertisement also heavily used graphic design in order to make products look more appealing and futuristic.

Rand Paul publishes the first book on design in 1947 where he establishes the field as it were and he led graphic design to become what it is today. Though the era was quite difficult as the post war was right around the corner, modernism began to fade away and post modernism was starting to take shape until the 60s. The emphasis on the graphic design was mainly two things, the expression of ideas, and the presentation of information which meant that both form and meaning were very important elements of graphic design. Universe, Helvetica and Arial were introduced as fonts which were one of the most used writing styles and even today Helvetica is the most used writing font. Artists like Bass have designed and created some of the most commonly known logos as we know them today such as “Dell”, “starkist”, IBM”, “UPS”, “Subway” and many others.

The new wave design has hit the streets around the 80s and the first computer to make images was the apple computer in 1984 that had the Bitmap graphics and the Macpaint. This was also during the time “page maker” was created to help new talents show their skills and power in graphic design, eventually leading to new wave typography, the Memphis group, retro design, the electronic revolution, and super graphics. The look and design of the graphics used were usually bold and bright coloured that popped to the eye.

The mass adoption of computers was really the time when graphic design has started to become a real job that has a lot of competition since then, people had easy access to computers and softwares for graphic designs were emerging since then.

