Did graphic design exist before computers?

Before computers, graphic designers had to do all the work manually. They literally had to copy, cut and paste everything. With more and more companies recognizing the benefits of graphic design, it was only a matter of time before the first graphic design agency emerged. That honor belongs to the Austrian company Wiener Werkstätte, an organization that contributed both to design style and to business.

Before computers, graphic design was a rather laborious and manual exercise that took several hours to complete even for very small projects. At the beginning of each job, the designer had to sit down and figure out what the client wanted and think of the best way to start from scratch. It involved a lot of iterations, since you first had to create sketches that would be shown to the customer before you had the opportunity to continue with the final design. This definitely makes me appreciate the past and look to the future as a next-generation designer.

The creators of Art Nouveau sought to revive good workmanship, raise the status of craftsmanship and produce a genuinely modern design that reflected the usefulness of the items they were creating. It's important to have a strong background in design history so you can understand where these trends come from and how to use them in your designs. The ancestors of modern companies, also booming, soon realized how those images could affect buying behaviors and increase profits, and so modern graphic design was born. With computers, publishers, writers and cleaning staff feel like they can ask what an enlarged, shrunken, or moving image from left to right looks like while on the designer's shoulder, usually drooling and breathing hard.

Basically, graphic designers take visual content, such as illustrations or photographs, and combine it with typography to communicate a message. With computers, designers have to slip up the back stairs to inhale into paper bags and get high. The Wiener Werkstätte, which simply means “Vienna workshop”, was the first organization of this type of visual artists, including painters, architects and early graphic designers. The adjunct professor of graphic design at Portland State University compiled a large number of design production manuals and was intrigued by the methods used before a computer.

It was relentless, which is why computers have been a great help to the graphic design industry. Although academic prints looked the same for a long time, the advent of newspapers helped to stylize print design, thanks to advertising. The teachers, like any production designer who had been in business for more than ten years, had multiple scars on their hands from exact cuts of the blade and were criminally crazy about the solvents that penetrated their brains through their fingertips. With the advent of printing in Europe, humanity was able to recreate text, art and design on a large scale and at a relatively low price.

Ian Russell
Ian Russell

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