Short answers, pulled from the story.
Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline, and applied art that involves creating visual communications to transmit specific messages to social groups with specific objectives. It is an interdisciplinary branch of design and the fine arts that uses text and graphics to communicate visually, drawing on creativity, innovation, and lateral thinking with manual or digital tools.
The term graphic design makes an early appearance in the 4th of July 1908 issue of Organized Labor, a publication of the Labor Unions of San Francisco, in an article about technical education for printers. The 1917-1918 course catalog of the California School of Arts and Crafts later advertised a course titled Graphic Design and Lettering, taught by Frederick Meyer.
A Buddhist scripture printed in 868 is the earliest known printed book. It was produced in China, where during the Tang dynasty, between 618 and 907, woodblocks were cut to print on textiles and later to reproduce Buddhist texts.
Movable type printing began in China in the 11th century, making books widely available during the Song dynasty between 960 and 1279. In the mid-15th century in Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg developed a faster way to reproduce printed pages using movable type made with a new metal alloy.
Nearly all of the industry-standard software used by graphic designers since the early 1990s comes from Adobe Inc., including Adobe Photoshop for raster photo editing and Adobe Illustrator for vector drawing, with final assembly often done in Adobe InDesign, Serif PagePlus, or QuarkXPress. CorelDraw from Corel Corporation is used worldwide, and free open-source options include Inkscape, GIMP, Krita, and Scribus.
As of 2023, median pay for graphic design work was 58,910 dollars per year. Employment in online project design was expected to increase by 35 percent by 2026, while employment in traditional media such as newspaper and book design was expected to decline by 22 percent.
The First Things First manifesto is a critique from within the graphic design community that proposes a reversal of priorities toward more useful, lasting, and democratic forms of communication. It was first launched by Ken Garland in 1964 and re-published as the First Things First 2000 manifesto in 1999 in the magazine Emigre 51.