Celebrating 100 Years Of Graphic Design

Author: Frank Romano, Museum of Printing

This year marks the 100th anniversary of terms graphic design and graphic designer. To celebrate this milestone, ColorKarma is working on a series of articles about the history and evolution of graphic design with industry expert and historian Frank Romano. In this first article, Frank discusses the introduction of the term and how the graphic arts industry started.

History Lesson:

In 1922 William Addison Dwiggins coined the term graphic design when describing the process of book design as a combination of typesetting, illustration, and design.

While the concept of laying out a page with type and graphics existed long before Dwiggins, it was always done by the printer. Printers from Gutenberg to Caslon laid out pages and determined the typeface and graphics. Essentially, the printer owned the entire process – the layout.

Dwiggins realized that the world had changed. As director of the Harvard University Press, Dwiggins knew that ‘seeing’ was just as important as reading. Advances in printing technology, graphics capabilities, and different typefaces allowed for more visual elements in printed materials.

By the 1920s, printers were using types from different machines. The Linotype machine (which produced a line of type) was the dominant leader in typesetting, along with its sister machine, the Intertype. Dwiggins, the constant creative, designed popular typefaces such as Caledonia and Fairfield for these machines. He saw that typesetting and graphic capabilities enabled the reproduction of imagery to take off in print. He believed a new process was needed to bring visual elements together on the page.

According to Dwiggins, a person was now needed to successfully organize the page into an aesthetic and logical order with body copy, fonts, and graphics. He called this process graphic design, and the person who did this work was the graphic designer. Dwiggins considered himself a graphics designer, and his work is an excellent example of using type, illustration, and graphics to bring a printed page to life.

Graphic Design Takes Off in Publishing:

Within newspapers and magazines, there has always been advertising. While advertising agencies provided copy, the printer was responsible for arranging the font, text, and graphics. By the 1900s, that was beginning to change. Advertising agencies like J. Walter Thompson started creating and designing ad layouts and sending them to newspapers. Printers no longer needed to lay out ads.

As the book publishing and advertising industries grew, this created a new sector dedicated to graphic design and layout. There were now new roles, like art directors and graphic designers, responsible for designing books and creating ad campaigns for newspapers and magazines worldwide.

First Graphic Designer:

Since Dwiggins coined the term, he has been considered one of the first graphic designers. He honed his craft, designing hundreds of books. Dwiggins also wrote one of the first graphic design books, Layout in Advertising, where he shared best practices in working with text and images.

As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the term graphic design, we celebrate William Addison Dwiggins, the man who gave us the term and showed us how the world was changing as design moved from the printing company to independent graphics professionals.

If you are interested in learning more, Dwiggins is from:

Hingham, Massachusetts, and the Hingham Library, has a whole exhibit of his work. You can also visit the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts, to see the evolution of printing and typesetting machines and the materials they produce.

Show your support by donating to the Museum of Printing Today.