Chinese inventions slowly spread across the Middle East and into Europe. By the 15th century, woodblock broadsides and books printed on paper were being made in Europe. By 1450 Johannes Gutenberg (Gutenberg, Johannes) of Mainz (Germany) invented a method for printing text from raised alphabet characters cast on movable metal types. After this, printed books began to replace costly handmade manuscript books. Designers of early typographic books in Europe attempted to replicate manuscripts, often designing type styles based on current manuscript lettering styles. When the type was printed, spaces were left for illuminators to add pictures, ornate initials, and other decorative material by hand. In this way, the compositor or typesetter was in effect the designer as he set the type. Some surviving copies of Gutenberg (Gutenberg Bible)'s landmark 42-line Bible have headers, initials, and sentence markers applied by hand in red and blue inks.

Over time, typographic books developed their own design vocabulary. By the mid-15th century, printers combined woodblock illustrations with typeset text to create easily produced, illustrated printed books. They printed woodblock decorative borders and ornamental initials along with the type, subsequently having colour applied by hand to these printed elements. The first complete printed title page—identifying the book title, author, printer, and date—was designed for Regiomontanus's Calendarium in 1476.

The prototype for Renaissance book design was the Aldine Press's 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, believed to be written by Francesco Colonna. The design of the work achieves an understated simplicity and tonal harmony, and its elegant synthesis of type and image has seldom been equaled. The layout combined exquisitely light woodcuts by an anonymous illustrator with roman types by Griffo utilizing new, smaller capitals; Griffo cut these types after careful study of Roman inscriptions. Importantly, double-page spreads were conceived in the book as unified designs, rather than as two separate pages.

During the 16th century, France became a centre for fine typography and book design. Geoffroy Tory (Tory, Geoffroy)—whose considerable talents included design, engraving, and illustration, in addition to his work as a scholar and author—created books with types, ornaments, and illustrations that achieved the seemingly contradictory qualities of delicacy and complexity. In his Book of Hours (1531), he framed columns of roman type with modular borders; these exuberant forms were a perfect complement to his illustrations.

Graphic design often involves a collaboration of specialists. Many 18th-century artists specialized in book illustration. One such artist was Frenchman Charles Eisen, who illustrated French poet Jean de La Fontaine (La Fontaine, Jean de)'s Contes et nouvelles en vers (1762; Tales and Novels in Verse). In this work, Joseph Gerard Barbou, the printer, used types and ornaments by Fournier, full-page engravings by Eisen, and complex spot illustrations and tailpieces by Pierre-Phillippe Choffard. This superb example of Rococo book design combined the ornamented types, decorative initials, elaborate frames and rules, and intricate illustrations typical of the genre.

The Didot Family of French printers, publishers, and typefounders also achieved Neoclassical ideals in their work. Books designed by the Didots have minimal decoration, generous margins, and simple linear borders. Pierre l'aîné Didot achieved technical perfection in his printing of the lavish éditions du Louvre. In these designs, Pierre utilized types designed at his brother Firmin's foundry, which provided a crisp counterpoint to the engraved illustrations by various artists working in the school of the French Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David (David, Jacques-Louis). The idealized figures in ancient Roman environments in the éditions were engraved with flawless technique, obsessive detail, and sharp contrasts of light and shadow.

One popular medium for the graphic designer became the poster. Posters printed with large wood types were used extensively to advertise new modes of transportation, entertainment, and manufactured goods throughout the 19th century. This was possible in part because typefounders developed larger sizes of types for use on posted announcements and innovated new typefaces including sans serif, slab serif, and decorative designs. An American printer, Darius Wells, invented a lateral router that enabled the economical manufacture of abundant quantities of large wooden types, which cost less than half as much as large metal types. Wood-type posters usually had vertical formats; types of a mixture of sizes and styles were set in horizontal lines with a left-and-right alignment that created a visual unity. A poster produced in 1854 for the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, for example, combined typefaces that were outlined, drop-shadowed, decorative, sans serif, slab serif, extremely wide, and narrow, all innovations that appeared during the 19th century.

The poster became even more popular as a result of advances in lithography, which had been invented about 1798 by Alois Senefelder (Senefelder, Alois) of Bavaria. Building upon this discovery, colour lithographs, called chromolithographs (oleograph), were widely used in the second half of the 19th century, and designers created increasingly colourful posters that decorated the walls of cities, publicizing events, traveling entertainment shows, and household products. Designers of chromolithographic prints drew all the elements—text and image—as one piece of artwork; freed from the technical restraints of letterpress printing, they could invent fanciful ornaments and lettering styles at will. Many chromolithographs reflected an interest in the 1856 publication of English designer Owen Jones's The Grammar of Ornament, a methodical collection of design patterns and motifs that contained examples from Asian, African, and Western cultures. (Such explorations were consistent with the fascination with historicism and elaborate decoration found in architecture and product design during the Victorian era.)

Momentum for this poster-design approach began in France, where poster designer Jules Chéret (Chéret, Jules) was a pioneer of the movement. Beginning his career in 1867, he created large-scale lithographic posters that featured vibrant colour, animated figures, textured areas juxtaposed against flat shapes, and happy, energetic figures capturing la belle époque of turn-of-the-century Paris. Chéret designed more than one thousand posters during his career.

Chromolithography also made colourful pictures available to the homes of ordinary people for the first time in history. Designers developed ideas for packaged goods that were offered to the public in tins printed with iconic images, bright colours, and embellished lettering. They also created trade cards and “scrap,” which were packets of printed images of birds, flowers, and other subjects collected by children.

The Kelmscott Press recaptured the beauty and high standards of incunabula (texts produced when books were still copied by hand), and the book again became an art form. The press's masterwork is the ambitious 556-page The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Four years in the making, the Kelmscott Chaucer has 87 woodcut illustrations from drawings by renowned artist Edward Burne-Jones (Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Coley, 1st Baronet). For the single work, Morris designed 14 large borders, 18 smaller frames for the illustrations, and over 200 initial letters and words. An exhaustive effort was required by everyone involved in the project.

The Kelmscott Press's influence became immediately apparent in the rise of the private-press movement: printers and designers established small printing firms to design and print carefully crafted, limited-edition books of great beauty. Architect and designer Charles Robert Ashbee (Ashbee, Charles Robert) founded the Essex House Press in London, and bookbinder Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson (Cobden-Sanderson, Thomas James) joined printer Sir Emery Walker (Walker, Sir Emery) in establishing the Doves Press at Hammersmith. Books from the Doves Press, including its monumental masterpiece, the 1903 Doves Press Bible, are remarkably beautiful typographic books. They have no illustrations or ornaments; the press instead relied upon fine paper, perfect presswork, and exquisite type and spacing to produce inspired page designs. The Ashendene Press, directed by Englishman C.H. St. John Hornby, was another exceptional English private press of the period. Following the example of Morris, these private presses believed strongly in the social value of making attractive and functional visual communications that were available to citizens of all walks of life.

Art Nouveau was an international design movement that emerged and touched all of the design arts—architecture, fashion, furniture, graphic, and product design—during the 1890s and the early 20th century. Its defining characteristic was a sinuous curvilinear line. Art Nouveau graphic designs often utilized stylized abstract shapes, contoured lines, and flat space inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Artists in the West became aware of ukiyo-e prints as trade and communication between Eastern and Western nations increased during the last half of the 19th century. Building upon the example of the Japanese, Art Nouveau designers made colour, rather than tonal modeling, the primary visual attribute of their graphics.

Alphonse Mucha (Mucha, Alphonse), a young Czech artist who worked in Paris, is widely regarded as the graphic designer who took Art Nouveau to its ultimate visual expression. Beginning in the 1890s, he created designs—usually featuring beautiful young women whose hair and clothing swirl in rhythmic patterns—that achieved an idealized perfection. He organized into tight compositions lavish decorative elements inspired by Byzantine and Islamic design, stylized lettering, and sinuous female forms. Like many other designers at the time, Mucha first captured public notice for poster designs, but he also received commissions for magazine covers, packages, book designs, publicity materials, and even postage stamps. In this way, the role and scope of graphic-design activity steadily expanded throughout the period.

Art Nouveau rejected historicism and emphasized formal invention, and so it became a transitional movement from Victorian design to the modern art movements of the early 20th century. This sense of transition is quite evident in the work of the Belgian artist and designer Henry van de Velde (Velde, Henry van de). After turning from Post-Impressionist painting to furniture and graphic design in the 1890s, he used lines and shapes inspired by the natural world and abstracted them to the point that they appeared as “pure form”; that is, they appeared as abstract forms invented by the designer rather than as forms from nature. In works such as his poster for Tropon food concentrate (1899), undulating linear movements, organic shapes, and warm-hued colours combine into a nonobjective graphic expression. Although this poster has been interpreted as signifying the process of separating egg yolks and whites, the typical viewer perceives it as pure form.

Similarly exploring issues of form, and inspired in part by the theories and work of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (Wright, Frank Lloyd), architects Charles Rennie Mackintosh (Mackintosh, Charles Rennie) and J. Herbert McNair joined artists (and sisters) Margaret and Frances Macdonald in a revolutionary period of creativity beginning in the 1890s. This group in Glasgow, Scotland, combined rectangular structure with romantic and religious imagery in their unorthodox furniture, crafts, and graphic designs. In a poster it made for the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts (1895), for example, the group's emphasis upon rising vertical composition is evident.

In the first decade of the 20th century, the experiments with pure form begun in the 1890s continued and evolved. Although the Glasgow group received a cool reception in the British Isles, designers in Austria and Germany were inspired by their move toward geometric structure and simplicity of form. In Austria, a group of young artists led by Gustav Klimt (Klimt, Gustav) broke with the Künstlerhaus in 1897 and formed the Vienna Secession. These artists and architects rejected academic traditions and sought new modes of expression. In their exhibition posters and layouts and illustrations for the Secession magazine, Ver Sacrum, members pushed graphic design in uncharted aesthetic directions. Koloman Moser's poster for the 13th Secession exhibition (1902) blends three figures, lettering, and geometric ornament into a modular whole. The work is composed of horizontal, vertical, and circular lines that define flat shapes of red, blue, and white. Moser and architect Josef Hoffmann (Hoffmann, Josef) were instrumental in establishing the Wiener Werkstätte (“Vienna Workshops”), which produced furniture and design objects.

The German school of poster design called Plakatstil (“Poster Style”) similarly continued the exploration of pure form. Initiated by Lucian Bernhard with his first poster in 1905, Plakatstil was characterized by a simple visual language of sign and shape. Designers reduced images of products to elemental, symbolic shapes that were placed over a flat background colour, and they lettered the product name in bold shapes. Plakatstil gained numerous adherents, including Hans Rudi Erdt, Julius Gipkens, and Julius Klinger.

Concurrent with these developments, in Germany Peter Behrens (Behrens, Peter) played an important role in graphic design. Behrens helped to develop a philosophy of Neue Sachlichkeit (“New Objectivity”) in design, which emphasized technology, manufacturing processes, and function, with style subordinated to purpose. In 1907 Emil Rathenau (Rathenau, Emil), head of the AEG (AEG AG) (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, a vast electrical manufacturing firm), appointed Behrens as artistic adviser for all of AEG's activities. Rathenau, a farsighted industrialist, believed industry needed the visual order and consistency that could only be provided by design. For AEG, Behrens developed what may be considered the first cohesive “visual identity system”; he consistently used the same logo (trademark), roman typeface styles, and geometric grids to create product catalogs, magazines, posters, other printed matter, and architectural graphics. Behrens's work for AEG was a harbinger of a major area of graphic design in the second half of the 20th century: the creation of a corporate identity through a program using trademarks, typefaces, formats, and colour in a consistent, controlled manner.

In addition to such aesthetic, commercial, and corporate purposes, graphic design also played an important political role in the early 20th century, as seen in posters and other graphic propaganda produced during World War I. Colour printing had advanced to a high level, and governments used poster designs to raise funds for the war effort, encourage productivity at home, present negative images of the enemy, encourage enlistment in the armed forces, and shore up citizens' morale. Plakatstil was used for many Axis posters, while the Allies primarily used magazine illustrators versed in realistic narrative images for their own propaganda posters. The contrast between these two approaches can be seen in a comparison of German designer Gipkens's poster for an exhibition of captured Allied aircraft with American illustrator James Montgomery Flagg (Flagg, James Montgomery)'s army recruiting poster (both 1917). Gipkens expressed his subject through signs and symbols reduced to flat colour planes within a unified visual composition. In contrast, Flagg used bold lettering and naturalistic portraiture of an allegorical person appealing directly to the potential recruit. The difference between these two posters signifies the larger contrast between graphic design on the two continents at the time.

Cassandre (the pseudonym of Adolphe-Jean-Marie Mouron) used figurative geometry and modulated planes of colour, derived from Cubism, to revitalize postwar French poster design. From 1923 until 1936, Cassandre designed posters in which he reduced his subject matter to bold shapes and flat, modulated icons. He emphasized two-dimensional pattern, and he integrated lettering with his imagery to make a unified overall composition. Cassandre also utilized airbrushed blends and grading to soften rigid geometry. His clients included steamship lines, railways, and clothing, food, and beverage companies.

The unprecedented graphic designs produced during this period were explained and demonstrated to printers and designers through writings and designs by Jan Tschichold (Tschichold, Jan), a young German designer. As a result, many designers in Europe and throughout the world embraced this new approach to graphic design. An announcement for Tschichold's book Die neue Typographie (1928; “The New Typography”) typifies his own philosophy. Tschichold advocated functional design that uses the most direct means possible. His systematic methodology emphasized contrast of type sizes, widths, and weights, and he used white space and spatial intervals as design elements to separate and organize material. He included only elements that were essential to the content and page structure.

Magazines (magazine) placed more emphasis upon graphic design during the postwar period. Alexey Brodovitch (Brodovitch, Alexey), the art director of Harper's Bazaar from 1934 until 1958, pioneered a new approach to magazine design. He created a flowing perceptual experience for the reader who paged through his magazines by varying sizes of type and imagery, alternating complex pages with simple layouts containing large areas of white space, and creating an overall sense of rhythmic movement. The beauty of Brodovitch's designs was enhanced by the impressive team of collaborators at Bazaar, which included photographer Richard Avedon (Avedon, Richard).

The emergence of television began to alter the roles of print media and graphic design, while also creating new opportunities for designers to work on television commercials and on-air graphics. “Motion graphics” are kinetic graphic designs for film titles and television that occur in the fourth dimension—time. A variety of animated film techniques were applied to motion-picture titling in the 1950s by Saul Bass (Bass, Saul) and, in Canada, by Norman McLaren of the Canadian National Film Board. For example, Bass's titles for Otto Preminger's 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder reduce a prone figure to disjointed parts, which move onto the screen in carefully orchestrated sequences that conclude with their positioning to form the figure; the lettering of the film's title appears as part of the sequence.

As popular music became increasingly culturally significant, graphics for the recording industry emerged as a locus of design creativity. One Push Pin Studio founder, Milton Glaser (Glaser, Milton), captured the imagination of a generation with his stylized curvilinear drawing, bold flat colour, and original concepts. Glaser's poster (1967) for folk-rock musician Bob Dylan (Dylan, Bob) is one of many music graphics from the 1960s that achieved an iconic presence not unlike that of Flagg's I Want You poster from World War I. Over the course of the second half of the century, Glaser steadily expanded his interests to include magazine design, restaurant and retail store interiors, and visual identity systems.

One of the many advertising designers who launched his career at Doyle Dane Bernbach was George Lois, whose works were engagingly simple and direct. Lois went on to design over 90 covers for Esquire magazine in the 1960s. He used powerful photographs and photomontages, usually by Carl Fischer, to make succinct editorial statements about the United States. These designs acted as independent visual/verbal statements about such topics as assassinations and civil rights.

In the Middle East, graphic designers often applied new technology to depictions of traditional subject matter and iconography. Throughout the late 20th century, Iranian graphic designer Ghobad Shiva evoked the colour palette, traditional Arabic calligraphy, and page layouts of ancient Persian manuscripts in his graphic work, which ranged from packaging to advertising and editorial design to stage sets. His poster (1984) celebrating the 800th anniversary of the birth of the renowned Iranian poet Saadi, for example, displays his exquisite control of colour and his ability to create a vibrant image. These stylized illustrations continued the traditions of ancient Persian manuscript books, but within the context of a contemporary design idiom.

Software for Apple (Apple Inc.)'s 1984 Macintosh computer, such as the MacPaint™ program by computer programmer Bill Atkinson and graphic designer Susan Kare, had a revolutionary human interface. Tool icons controlled by a mouse or graphics tablet enabled designers and artists to use computer graphics in an intuitive manner. The Postscript™ page-description language from Adobe Systems, Inc., enabled pages of type and images to be assembled into graphic designs on screen. By the mid-1990s, the transition of graphic design from a drafting-table activity to an onscreen computer activity was virtually complete.

Rapid advances in onscreen software also enabled designers to make elements transparent; to stretch, scale, and bend elements; to layer type and images in space; and to combine imagery into complex montages. For example, in a United States postage stamp from 1998, designers Ethel Kessler and Greg Berger digitally montaged John Singer Sargent (Sargent, John Singer)'s portrait of Frederick Law Olmsted (Olmsted, Frederick Law) with a photograph of New York's Central Park, a site plan, and botanical art to commemorate the landscape architect. Together these images evoke a rich expression of Olmsted's life and work.

Good general sources include Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast, Graphic Style from Victorian to Digital (2000), which classifies over 700 illustrations of graphic designs according to stylistic attributes, accompanied by brief texts; Alan Livingston and Isabella Livingston, The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of Graphic Design and Designers (1992), which has over one thousand entries on designers, terms, and movements; and Philip B. Meggs, A History of Graphic Design, 3rd ed. (1998), which gives an overview of the evolution of graphic design from prehistoric pictographs to the digital revolution and is copiously illustrated.Studies on specific aspects of design include Norma Laearie, The Art & History of Books (1968, reissued 1995), a survey of the progression of book design and production from early manuscripts to 20th-century fine printing; and John Lewis, Anatomy of Printing: The Influences of Art and History on Its Design (1970).Studies of specific periods of design include Jonathan J.G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work (1992); Ellen Mazur Thomson, The Origins of Graphic Design in America, 1870–1920 (1997); and Laurel Harper, Radical Graphics/Graphic Radicals (1999), which displays works by designers who from 1985 to 1999 have broken with design traditions.Several important and lavishly illustrated periodicals cover contemporary graphic design and visual communications. Communication Arts (8/yr.), published by Coyne & Blanchard, showcases portfolios of contemporary visual communications; four special annual issues present competitions in illustration (July), photography (August), design (November), and advertising (December). The bimonthly Graphis, published by Graphis Inc., presents articles and works by contemporary visual communicators and covers outstanding practitioners from many countries. Print: America's Graphic Design Magazine, also bimonthly, published by RC Publications, deals with contemporary visual communications; three issues are devoted to annual competitions in European design (by country), interactive media design, and American graphic design (by region), respectively.Philip B. Meggs