Where graphics are put to use
Graphics point a reader at a particular piece of information, and they sit beside text to make a concept clearer or simply more interesting. The difference between those two jobs is visible on a newsstand. Magazines such as Time, Wired, and Newsweek carry a lot of graphic material, because pictures attract readers. The majority of scholarly journals do not. A journal can afford to be hard to enter. A magazine that is hard to enter does not get picked up.
In computing, graphics are how a graphical interface presents data: symbols and pictures rather than text alone. They are also counted as one of the five key elements of multimedia. And they are among the primary ways of advertising that something is for sale. That last use has a way of swallowing the others. A diagram made to explain a product and a diagram made to sell it can be the same file.
Business, advertising, politics
Graphics are commonly used in business and economics to make financial charts and tables. The term business graphics came into use in the late 1970s, when personal computers became able to draw graphs and charts instead of leaving the numbers in a tabular format. A chart of that kind earns its place when it shows a change over time that a column of figures would have buried. It wastes its place when it only repeats the table in a louder colour.
Advertising is one of the most profitable uses of graphics. Artists often do advertising work, or they keep the chance of a sale in mind while making the work, because that chance changes what gets made. There is no clean wall between "a picture" and "a picture with a client." There is a wall between a picture that admits the client and a picture that pretends not to have one.
Using graphics for openly political ends is centuries old and still busy in every part of the world: cartoons, graffiti, poster art, flags. The murals of Northern Ireland are one example, painted arguments on the gable ends of houses. A later and much more widely seen example is Shepard Fairey's 2008 poster of Barack Obama, the "Hope" image. It was published on the web first, and soon turned up on streets across the United States. The path matters. A political graphic no longer has to start on paper to end up on a wall.
School and the moving explanation
Textbooks, especially in geography, science, and mathematics, lean on graphics to show a theory or a structure such as human anatomy. Diagrams are also used to label photographs, so that a picture of a thing and the names of its parts stay attached. An encyclopedia uses graphics to illustrate a concept and to give an example of the topic under discussion. The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary uses graphics and technical illustrations to make an entry more interesting and easier to follow. A definition you can see is a different tool from a definition you can only parse.
None of that works unless the learner can interpret the picture. That capacity is one aspect of what has been called graphicacy, the pictorial cousin of literacy. A chart that the reader cannot read is not a teaching aid. It is decoration with pretensions.
Educational animation is a growing part of the same work. Animated graphics have an obvious advantage over still ones when the subject changes with time: a cycle, a procedure, a machine in motion. The advantage is real and easy to overspend. Motion that does not correspond to a change in the subject teaches the motion, not the subject.
Film, training, and the web
Computer graphics are used in the majority of new feature films, especially those with a large budget. Films that lean on them heavily include the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Harry Potter films, Spider-Man, and War of the Worlds. The picture on screen may still be a photograph of an actor. A large part of what surrounds the actor was never in front of a lens. Film is now one of the main customers for graphics.
Most schools, colleges, and universities teach graphic design and art in some form. Courses differ in the balance they strike between craft and a thoughtful answer to a client's brief. Some put traditional craft first: drawing, printmaking, typography. Some put digital craft first. Some play the craft down and spend the time on how a student responds to a problem. Staff and students on any of these courses will generally still call themselves graphic designers. The argument about the syllabus does not produce a different profession. It produces different first jobs.
The usual teaching model goes back to the Bauhaus in Germany and to Vkhutemas in Russia. Students meet a spread of craft skills, which now runs from drawing through to motion capture, and they are asked to pay attention to visual culture outside the classroom. A few proper names belong in that history because the work is still under people's hands. Aldus Manutius designed the first italic type, still a normal part of desktop publishing. William Caslon, in the middle of the eighteenth century, designed a family of types that later revivals keep returning to, among them Caslon Old Face and Big Caslon. Paul Rand designed corporate marks that became part of the public street, including those for IBM, NeXT, and UPS. April Greiman is known for poster work that treated the new digital tools as a design material rather than as a shortcut.
Pictures on a web page
In the 1990s, as internet connections got faster, browsers that could show images appeared. Mosaic was the first. Sites used the GIF format for small graphics: banners, advertisements, navigation buttons. Browsers now also show JPEG, PNG, and, increasingly, SVG, alongside GIF. SVG, and to some extent VML, made it possible to show a vector graphic that stays clear at any size. Plugins extended the browser further, into animated, interactive, and three-dimensional graphics in formats such as SWF and X3D.
The tools are ordinary ones. Adobe Photoshop, the GIMP, and Corel Paint Shop Pro are graphics packages in the full sense. Windows users also have Paint. Many people find Paint short of features, which is fair, and also slightly beside the point: Paint is a drawing package, not a graphics package. It will make a mark. It will not do the job of preparing a picture for a dozen different uses.
Around those tools, people built places to put the work. Forum signatures, the small pictures that follow a post, became a whole minor craft: photo manipulations, large decorative graphics, marks made so that a reader recognises who is speaking before they read the name. Game studios grew communities, and other sites grew up to supply graphics for fans to put on a profile. It is easy to sneer at a signature. It is also a reminder that a graphic is often a very small picture with a social job, not a poster and not a film frame. SVG is where a lot of that small, sharp work lives now, because a mark drawn as geometry survives being shown at the size of a button and at the size of a header.