DM112 - Graphic Design
20th Century - Conceptual Image

Sensing that traditional narrative illustration did not address the needs of the times, post-World War I pictorial modernism reinvented the communicative image to express the age of the machine and the advanced visual ideas of the period. In a similar quest for new imagery, the decades after World War II saw the development of the conceptual image in graphic design. Images conveyed not merely narrative information but ideas and concepts. Mental content joined perceived content as motif.

The illustrator interpreting a writer's text yielded to the graphic imagist making a statement. Instead of scooping a rectangle of the picture space from the printed page, this new breed was concerned with the total design of the space and the integration of word and image. In the exploding information culture of the second half of the twentieth century, the entire history of visual arts became available to the graphic artist as a library of potential forms and images.

Graphic artists had greater opportunity for self-expression, created more personal images, and pioneered individual styles and techniques. The traditional boundaries between the fine arts and public visual communications became blurred.

During the 1950s the golden age of American illustration was drawing to a close. For over fifty years narrative illustration had ruled American graphic design, but improvements in paper, printing, and photography caused the illustrator's edge over the photographer to decline rapidly.

Traditionally, illustrators had exaggerated value contrasts, intensified color, and made edges and details sharper than life to create more convincing images than photography. But now, improvements in materials and processes enabled photography to expand its range in lighting conditions and image fidelity.

The death of illustration was somberly predicted as photography made rapid inroads into illustration's traditional market. But as photography stole illustration's traditional function--the creation of narrative and descriptive images--a new approach to illustration emerged. A primary wellspring of this more conceptual approach to illustration began with a group of young New York graphic artists.