Why Graphic!?

"Graphic" can be used to describe a great variety of things, from grisly war photos to simple how-to diagrams; from company logos to the designers who created them; from harrowing oral accounts to realistic, medical descriptions; and from sexually explicit videos to simple representational pie charts.

The connotation behind this single word can swing so wildly: Detailed, hyper-realistic, diagrammatic, mathematical. Lurid, explicit, shocking, provocative! “Artsy,” pictorial, illustrative, even picturesque... Is there any other term that boasts such a broad conceptual wingspan?

We couldn’t help ourselves. At a moment when the collective “we” seems to be advancing, full-throttle, into the heart of the beast that is all things graphic, it seemed high time to look that beast in the eye.

Why the exclamation mark? Because an exclamation mark is, all on its own, provocative! It is, by definition, a graphic representation of an aspect of language—a symbolic indicator of a particular tone and connotation, specifically meant to provoke and evoke. That’s a lot of output for a simple line and dot!