You come across graphics everywhere, and increasingly they have something to do directly with computers. You can display the optimal travel route on a car’s display. Statisticians use them to illustrate dry numbers, for example, as pie charts or bar graphs. And most user programs today run on graphic interfaces and are operated and controlled with the mouse by clicking on the small pictures contained therein, called icons.

After all, what would computer games be without the many graphics in the form of still or moving images and click here buttons? Almost frighteningly realistically recreated, you witness how a person might turn into a chicken or how fantasy figures suddenly become living creatures.

Image and computer graphics

Computers have been spreading at breakneck speed since the 1980s. They surpass each other in their technical parameters and features, and there is no end in sight to this development. The influence of computers in particular gave the pictures unprecedented importance. This has had a lasting effect on society as a whole and the life of each individual.

The radical change does not only affect the pictures in the narrower sense of the word. The media that bring you the images are also subject to major changes. Electronic media with an almost unmanageable variety of forms of representation have long since joined the classic image carriers such as paper, foil, film, or typography. The image received a specific meaning with the graphic, other forms of representation were, for example, photographs, films, or geographical maps.

In a way, computer graphics bring the associated methods and representation techniques together again at a higher level. At the same time, it opens up unimagined dimensions of design again and again.

Graphic term

The term graphics comes from the visual arts. Traditionally, it designates a product for the clear representation of real and imaginary objects. The artist creates “his” originals as woodcuts, copper engravings, paintings, prints, etchings, or lithographs, to name just a few of the many possible processes. The freehand drawings with pencil or charcoal can also be assigned to these “original graphics”. The artist brings his view of the world two-dimensionally, for example as lines, patterns, and colors on paper or canvas.

Since the advent of computers, interest in graphics has skyrocketed. The concept of graphics has been significantly expanded by digital technology. In today’s understanding, graphics are also all computer-based data intended for an output device. Some examples of devices are screens, plotters, printers, slide recorders, video recorders, and projectors.

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