Graphic Design

Graphic design has been around since the time of ancient Egypt and ancient China. They used pictures to depict words or syllabuses. It was a system kept for the elite and too extraordinary talent and patience to draw the thousands of different symbols and pictures. In Medieval times that graphic design became a respected art form and was prominent in monasteries where books were carefully copied with an emphasis on combining Illustrations with letters.

Digital Design

The age of digital design started in the 60's when the designer William Pater developed a way of displaying pictures on a computer but it was only in 1965 that the new system was used with a single colour. The letters were first created with mathematical formulas. The first computer that had digital graphic abilities was a Macintosh; it had limited graphic design capabilities, fonts, offered the most basic colours and cost $10,000.

The Beginning Of The Digital Age

It was in the late 70's/early 80's that digital graphics became popular with the first video games such as Atari's pong and Commodore Computers. The first graphic design program that worked with bodies of text was the MacPublisher. This program worked on the Macintosh computer which had a 128kb memory and no hard disc. It was the most basic limited program that suffered from problems such as the inability to control spacing between letters, it did not allow for the addition or subtraction of spaces when trying to alter a body of text and more often than not, what was on the screen was not necessarily what came out on a printout. However, in spite of these issues, the program was received with enthusiasm and received wide acclaim. Macintosh went on to lead in the field of graphic design programs for some time after.

The Development of Digital Graphics

It may seem hard to believe but in the early days of computer generated graphics, with the exception of some games, the graphic abilities of computers was so primitive that it was still limited to a number of simple fonts and basic colours. There were no real design programs to speak of and movies such as "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" still relied on hand drawn illustrations.

Despite the difficulties, the hidden possibilities of the computer/graphics combination caught the imagination of many and of three big industries in particular, they were the video gaming industry, the printing industry and of course the cinematic industry. In 1995 the movie Toy Story was released, this of course was the first movie ever made using only digital graphics.