Yo. So I realize that I throw the term graphics design around without defining it, and that is bad. I would like to take a momet to point out that graphics design is a separate idea and methodology from graphic design. Although graphics designers frequently utilize tools also employed by graphic designers — most notably Photoshop — the practice of graphics design employs its own unique approach to key sub-disciplines, such as illustration, typography, and composition logic.

I thought the history of the phrase was relatively straightforward and local. To wit: At the beginning of fall semester last year, Sue spotted an 8x10” laser-printed ad with tear-off phone numbers, set in Times New Roman via Microsoft Word, advertising the need for a “graphics designer”. The ad went on to detail a fantastically shitty proposition in which you, the putative graphics designer, would do a fantastic spectrum of horribly grueling work for the company in question. Furthermore, you wouldn’t get paid, but “the work would contribute to your portfolio” or some such nonsense.

Sue plucked this ad from the provence of whatever bulletin board she found it, and stuck it on the interior door of the studio. It was the root cause of a great deal of amusement, and the term has fallen into common parlance around here, generally in reference to ridiculous work or amusing addenda to grad student life. Marcos, for example, is new this year, but he employs the term as fluidly as those who were here last year.

I was wrong about all this. Graphics design is a discipline which is alive and well in a scope that far excedes our studio walls, even now. It exists as a parallel to our practice of graphic design, much like the shadow police agency Phillip K. Dick outlined in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I present to you the following:

… I was searching flickr for images of Sue’s original find, and I found the above flyer (originally at this source). This unrelated work sums up exactly what ours did, but it comes from a different place and time. Further cursory googling revealed this website.

It is clear from these examples that graphics design is an entity whose evolution is interlocked with graphic design in some sort of unendingly complex 4-dimensional ballet. That one “s” at the end of “graphics” there makes so much of a difference that I had to point it out. So. Now you know. Tell a friend. Yis.