Communicating through Design

I'm reading a book called Between Shades of Gray (this is not to be confused with the popular Fifty Shades of Grey).  This book is about a girl named Lina (you can't make this stuff up!) who is a young artist that is deported out of Lithuania, along with thousands of Lithuanians, to Siberia under Russian rule.  This girl is separated from her father in the process and as a result leaves drawings on walls during her travels in an attempt to get him to find her.

While reading this I immediately thought back in history to the time when graphic design first originated — to cave paintings and hieroglyphs.  Ancient Egyptians used cave drawings as a form to communicate just as we use graphic design to communicate today.

I feel that design has been and will continue to be primarily used as a tool for communication, not just for making things look good.  If you can't relay a message via this medium then what's the point? In university, we learned about a guy named Marshall McLuhan, who coined the term "the medium is the message".  His philosophic ideas always seemed a little deep for me, but what I think he was trying to say is that the physical medium, that poster or website you are designing, is in itself the message.  Not just what's written on the poster or site, but how the design and content ..."co-exist" (for lack of a better word).  As aspiring designers, it is our job to try to create cohesion between the message and the medium.

Graphic design has been around for ages, as it is an integral part of disseminating information.  It is up to the designer to determine how this information is going to be portrayed.  Now it is just a matter of doing it well, so that your audience can effectively understand what you are trying to say.