Graphics

Graphics show up all over the place—on walls, canvas, screens, paper, or stone—and their job is to inform, illustrate, or entertain. These days, the term also covers any pictorial representation of data used in design, manufacturing, typesetting, the graphic arts, and educational or recreational software. When a computer generates such an image, it’s called computer graphics.

The category is broad: photographs, drawings, line art, mathematical graphs, line graphs, charts, diagrams, typography, numbers, symbols, geometric designs, maps, engineering drawings, and other images all count. Graphics often mix text, illustration, and color. Graphic design can be as simple as deliberately selecting, creating, or arranging typography alone—like in a brochure, flyer, poster, website, or book—with no other element. The goal might be clarity, effective communication, linking to cultural ideas, or just developing a distinctive style.

Graphics can be functional or artistic. Artistic ones might be a recorded version, like a photograph, or an interpretation—by a scientist highlighting key features, or by an artist, where the line between reality and imagination gets fuzzy. Graphics also show up in architecture.

History

The earliest known graphics come from the Upper Palaeolithic period (40,000 to 10,000 B.C. or earlier): cave paintings and markings on boulders, bone, ivory, and antlers. Many recorded astronomical, seasonal, and chronological details. Almost 6,000 years ago, engraved stone tablets and ceramic cylinder seals appeared, marking the start of historical record-keeping for accounting and inventory.

Even earlier, Egyptians used papyrus to plan pyramid construction, along with slabs of limestone and wood. From 600 to 250 B.C., Greeks used graphics to represent mathematical theories like the Circle Theorem and the Pythagorean theorem. In art, “graphics” often refers to monotone, line-based work, as opposed to painting.

Drawing

Drawing involves making marks on a surface by pressing or moving a tool across it—if no tool is used, it’s considered art. Graphical drawing is specifically tool-guided.

Printmaking

Printmaking started in China after paper was invented around A.D. 105, with woodblock printing. In the West, main techniques include woodcut, engraving, and etching, among many others.

Etching is an intaglio method where an image is incised into a metal plate using acid; the acid eats the metal, leaving roughened areas or burning lines if the exposed surface is thin. Daniel Hopfer of Augsburg, Germany, who decorated armor this way, is credited with inventing the process for printmaking. Etching is also used to make printed circuit boards and semiconductor devices.

Line art

Line art is a loose term for images made of distinct straight and curved lines on a plain background, without gradations in shade or color to show depth. It’s usually monochromatic, though lines can be different colors.

An illustration is a visual representation—drawing, painting, photograph, or other artwork—that emphasizes subject over form. Its aim is to clarify or decorate a story, poem, or text, traditionally by showing something described in the words. Editorial cartoons (or political cartoons) are illustrations with a political or social message. Illustrations can give faces to characters, display examples in textbooks, visualize step-by-step instructions, set a narrative’s tone, link brands to human expression, or make readers laugh.

A graph or chart represents tabular or numeric data, often used to make large amounts of data and relationships between parts easier to grasp. A diagram is a simplified, structured visual of concepts, ideas, constructions, relations, or statistical data, meant to clarify the topic.

A symbol represents a concept or quantity—an idea, object, or quality. In psychological and philosophical terms, all concepts are symbolic, and their representations are token artifacts allegorical to a symbolic meaning. A map is a simplified depiction of a space, a navigational aid highlighting relations between objects within it, usually a two-dimensional, geometrically accurate representation of a three-dimensional space.