Graphic Design could be argued for being as old as humans have been sprawling art on walls, or since signs and banners have hung over market stalls and kingdom's armies; but if we were to argue that then we'd be here all day, so we're not going to.
Instead, we'll just mention that, with the invention of the printing press and the designing of typefaces to be used in these prints; the seeds for what we would come to know as 'Graphic Design' were sown, in the late 19th century.
From there, the 'Modernist' movement was born in the early 1900s, reflecting the form and strength of the established constructivism movement at the time, accepting and even embracing the truth in materials; that the tools you were using were all flat, and should be presented as such.
However, from this 'flatness' bore witness to several new distinct styles emerging from all over the world, reflecting the societal and political climate of the time.
Russian Constructivism was an attempt to reinvent the rules of visual communication, rejecting refined aesthetics in favour of dramatic and unconventional perspectives with vivid contrast with limited colour pallets. This was both a reflection of, as well as an effort to perpetuate, the rise of a worker's revolution at the time.
Constructivism helped play a major part in one of the most, if not thee most, visual styles of the modern day; The Bauhaus. Created from a school of thought in central Europe from 1919 to 1933, The Bauhaus characterises itself on its simplicity, abundance of white space, sans-serif typography, a move away from hand rendered illustration towards photography, and a distinct asymmetry in its layout.
This school of design was interrupted by the breakout of WW2 and, as such, the leading thought in graphic design was forced out of Europe into the United States, bringing the styles and teachings with them, creating the standard for the decades after the war.
This standard would later become known as Swiss design, known because of the advent of the world's favourite, and Swiss, font Helvetica, as well as the heavy reliance on grid systems for page layouts, reflecting the rise in corporate and capitalist thinking in the west during this time.
Permeating this entire timeline existed a slightly less mainstream and accepted approach to graphic design, known as dadasim, or simply 'often nonsensical experiments that tried to invoke emotions, rather than convey specific information', to give it its full name. These trends date back as far as the very late 1800s, and continued up until the 1970s until graphic designers began to tire of the rigid and simplistic nature of the designs they were creating, leading to the advent of Post-Modernism.
Post-Modernism sought to reject the imposed rules that Swiss and Bauhaus had imposed, choosing exuberance and exaggeration over form and informed design, a stylish mishmash of emotional response that cared less about what was being shown, but rather the way it was being shown.
And these two schools of though, the Modernist, Swiss and Bauhaus elegant design, and the more anarchic and emotional driven Post-Modernist design are what governs the world of Graphic Design today, with both still emerging in various places to varying degrees today.
However, due to the digital and information driven age we live in today, Modernist design's form and simplicity is resurging greatly, being implemented in interactive media, such as web-content as games, where the distorted and unclear nature of post-modernism would clutter and hinder the effectiveness of such content.
