Beginning of Graphic Designers

When most people think of graphic design, they think of modern work such as Shepard Fairey or Stefan Sagmeister, but graphic design really began in the caves of France. The beginning of graphic design can be directly connected to the beginning of typography. The very first designs were created many years ago in caves in Lascaux, France around 10,000 BC. Humans communicated with each other through these drawings of animals, fire, and weapons. 

The next drawings were found recorded in 3000 BC with early Sumerian writing in Mesopotamia. The Sumerian people used pointed styluses to draw pictograms (simplified images illustrating specific words) on clay tablets to create permanent records of business transactions. They later developed a writing system called cuneiform which used ideograms (images that stand for concepts or ideas) instead of pictograms. 

People all over the world were creating their own writing systems. In Egypt, people were developing the hieroglyphics writing system. These also started as pictograms before 3000 BC and eventually evolved into an interesting combination of pictographs, ideograms, and phonograms (symbols that represent sounds). 

As you can see, this is only the first 7,000 years of the beginning of graphic designing. I know at first it may be hard to see the connection, but this all came from the creative sides of peoples' brains and if it weren't for these early "designers", we would not have graphic design today.