The words ‘graphics’ and ‘computers’ today seem interlinked. Hear the job ‘graphic designer’ and you might imagine a laptop, a slightly pasty man in trendy specs tapping away, you might even know the names of the programmes (even the average viewer may have dabbled in a bit of Photoshop). Whichever way you think of it, there’s probably a screen involved somewhere.

It hasn’t always been this way. Graphics are involved in many different forms of visual artwork. From mono to silk screen printing, linography to retro typography, graphics surround us in many forms, every day.

War campaigning in the thirties involved cheap, hand drawn posters to rally the troops, with a limited palette of three colours and identifiable styles of individual designers. Graphics were employed as a government aide, both visually stunning and economically viable.

A government campaign poster from 1917, artist unknown

After the fifties boom, sixties pop artists like Peter Blake used mixed media techniques, literally cutting and pasting to achieve the layered yet structurally neat effect in pieces.

Lichtenstein’s Pontilism was a new way of looking at the world, a graphic approach cut out solely by one man (and today, for the less vivid version in a fraction of the time, just click the ‘pixellate’ button kindly provided by the nice people at Adobe).

Hockney’s ‘Splash’ series used the bright colours of the screen print in an almost photo-real sense to capture the pool’s sharp edges, and Warhol, the most famous of the pop generation,  printed on a mass scale to create his prints that celebrated and commiserated the visual detritus of the American dream.

Hockney, 'A Bigger Splash,' 1967

Today, computers are used to save time and money. Graphic artist Jo O’Gorman says: ‘Graphics are often used for advertising, when things need to be done quickly and efficiently. Technology is more accessible for people. People can afford to get on the computer and just do it.’

Is the ability to replicate something a good thing?

‘The more you replicate something, the more easily you can send it to people’ says Jo, ‘but the significance of an artists input can be lost, and most people like to see that individuality. Computers can have a flattening effect and pieces can lose their unique quality.’

Another danger is that people working from computers can adopt the same style. As Jo puts it: ‘There aren’t so many happy accidents – and if you familiarise yourself with types of techniques, you see things again and again, much in the same way to music. If people use the same programs, you will have the same sounds, and hear the same in a lot of music from a particular year.’

Computing allows us to use art to advertise on a mass scale – remember Apple’s iPod adverts with the dancing sihouettes, or think of O2′s slick new campaign; a bubble floats through a perfect grid-shaped city to land in the hand of our male model – with a metallic magnesium quality achieved only by a computer’s polish.

One of the iPod generation dances to the Ting Tings

Like any technique, if the artist knows their tools well enough, great things can happen, and if the graphic designer knows their programmes inside out then they can start to make it look unique. Takashi Murakami has a new twist on Warhol’s method, blending graphic design with multi-media to create his own ‘super-flat’ style.

The developed retro feel of Barclaycard’s new advert promoting ‘contactless technology’ shows a man travelling through a city on a slightly dodgy and inefficient slide, an advert which is clearly produced on a computer, but with a fun element that lacks any aspirations of slickness.

I wish I had a slide like this to get to work

The Obama ‘Hope’ poster by Shepard Fairey used three colours and a simple stencil technique, and proved to be one of the most effective and repeated of the campaign images. Speaking of the production of the poster, Fairey says: ‘It was down to the internet. I found an image, had it in production, and had the poster out the next day.’

Like Barclaycard’s new slogan, to make life simpler with ‘contactless technology,’ good graphic design does the same – making an impact, simply, by making contact.

Lizzie Simner