Author: Prema Chandrasekaran

EVOLUTION OF DESIGNING

We don’t often think about how easy the designing has become with the invention of the Computer. When we say design these days, our mind immediately thinks of people sitting in front of a system, working around with software like Photoshop and Illustrator. That wasn’t something that would come to mind before there were computers. Designers were required to do everything manually using various tools.

Back in the days, the designs were just ancient manuscripts in China, Egypt and Greece. And then came typesetting and desktop publishing with the development of printing and publishing in the 15th century.

As the evolution of industrialism started in the 17th century, it set a stage for graphic design production. Although it showed its impact only during the 19th century, designing slowly started to grow from the industrial revolution.

Designing was considered a profession in the West only during the late 19th century with the industrial revolution and improvements in the design technology. Before this revolution, everything was done using animal or manpower. With the help of designs, they tried to involve it everywhere and to produce the designs they came up with advanced technologies. The technology reduced the cost of producing a design and many designs were produced making them reach as many people as possible.

The first school that was ever founded to teach designing was The Bauhaus in the 19th century by Walter Gropius, in German. And the word “Graphic Designing” was used for the first time in the year 1922.

The first ever print magazine called “Print: A Quarterly Journal Of The Graphic Arts” was printed in the year 1940 and it continued its publication in different names till the year 2017. And the first design book was published in 1947 by Paul Rand. The name of the book is “Thoughts on Design”.

The mouse is the most important part of the computer used to design anything and it was first developed by Douglas Englebart. The first Macintosh computer featuring bitmap graphics was released in the year 1984 and then came Illustrator and Photoshop in the year 1987 and 1988 respectively. After the release of Photoshop and Illustrator, people slowly started to move to computers for designing.

Before the computer was developed, the process of designing was something that starts off with placing a layout board on the drawing table, use of photostat which was a machine to make copies on the layout board. It was then pasted to a drawing board with a white tape. Various hand tools were used to make a print design such as cutting blades to crop the photos, tweezers if they had to cut small pieces, glue to paste the photos. And everyone was specialized in a particular department. If one was good with the photostat, the other with cropping and the other with pasting and so on.

Once the computers came, it was a big shift while few of them welcomed it with warm hands and took advantage of it, the others couldn’t cope up with such a big change. With computers came new technologies and new software, all the tools used physically were included in the software and a design could be created with just one person. There are many software with different purposes to create a design like Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, CorelDraw etc.

Even at that point in time, they designed only for print. The World Wide Web and HTML was formed only in the year 1990 by Tim Berners Lee. And with the evolution of the internet, designing slowly started to shift to the web. We have transformed to digital design from print design. Although print is still existing, the majority of the designing is on the digital platform. The digital era of designing has changed entirely from how the design was once done but it only got smart and not the other way around.

What was once only done for print is now everywhere. The main form of designing was the only poster those days. But now we design for logos, icons, websites, online campaigns.

These days the designers can create a work, share it online on various platforms and get feedback from experts. We can find inspiration by looking at great designs and create an idea of our own. These are only possible because of the internet.

And this is not the end of the evolution. The process of designing will keep evolving. There will be new technologies and tools every now and then. As a designer, you should keep up with the new trends and evolve with the design.