Introduction

This book is called The Graphic Communication Handbook not The Graphic Design Handbook. Getting names right from the off is important: call it Pokey Cola, and it doesn’t taste as good; call it a Plum computer, and suddenly it’s not so glamorous to play with; and, over the course of the twentieth century, the title ‘Graphic Design’ has often come to mean something narrow, something limited. Something less than the subject’s history or its future prospects.