15,000 – 10,000 BC – The first known visual communication, with pictographs and symbols in the Lascaux caves in southern France.
3600 BC – The Blau Monument, the oldest artifact known to combine words and pictures.
105 AD – Chinese government official Ts’ai Lun credited with inventing paper.
1045 AD – Pi Sheng invents movable type, allowing for characters to be individually placed for printing.
1276 – Printing arrives in Europe with a paper mill in Fabriano, Italy.
1450 – Johann Gensfleisch zum Gutenburg credited with perfecting the system for printing type in books.
1460 – Albrecht Pfister the first to add illustrations to a printed book.
1470 – Nicolas Jenson, considered one of history’s greatest typeface designers, sets news standard for Roman type.
1530 – Claude Garamond opens first type foundry, developing and selling fonts to printers.
1722 – First Caslon Old Style font developed, later used for the printing of the Declaration of Independence.
1760 – Industrial Revolution begins, setting the stage for advances in graphic design production.
1796 – Author Aloys Senefelder develops lithography.
1800 – Lord Stanhope invents first printing press made of all cast-iron parts, requiring 1/10 the manual labor and doubling the possible paper size.
1816 – First sans-serif font makes a subtle entrance as one line of a book.
1861 – Williams Morris, who became a highly influential figure in design history, sets up art-decorating firm.
1880 – Development of halftone screen allows for first photo printed with a full range of tones.
1890 – Art Nouveau movement begins and changes design, making its way into all types of commercial design and utilizing all types of arts.
1917 – James Montgomery Flagg designs famous “I Want YOU for the U.S. Army” poster. The poster, a self-portrait, was actually an American version of a British poster by Alfred Leete.
1919 – The Bauhaus, a German school, is founded, eventually providing the framework for modern design.
1932 – Stanley Morison oversees design of Times New Roman font, commissioned by the Times of London.
1940 – First issue of Print Magazine printed.
1956 – Paul Rand designs IBM logo using City Medium typeface.
1957 – Max Miedinger designs Neue Haas Grotesk font, later renamed Helvetica.
1959 – First issue of Communication Arts printed.
1969 – Douglas Engelbart develops first computer mouse, setting the stage for the future tool of graphic design.
1984 – Apple releases first Macintosh computer, featuring bitmap graphics.
1985 – Aldus, formed by Paul Brainerd, develops PageMaker software. Brainerd coins the phrase “desktop publishing.” In the same year, New York firm Manhattan Design creates the MTV logo.
1990 – Photoshop version one released, and physicist Tim Berners-Lee develops the world wide web, along with HTML and the concept of website addresses