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Graphic Design

a guide for courses that include or focus on graphic design

Getting Started

While you are researching and studying graphic design, it is helpful to access examples of creations from other artists.  The box below provides links to online showcases and galleries where you can view work related to graphic design without visiting a museum.  

book covers

photo courtesy: Book Cover Archive

Websites

  • AdViews is "a digital archive of thousands of vintage television commercials dating from the 1950s to the 1980s."
  • AIGA Design Archives "serves to identify, preserve, and make collections of enduring value available to the public." It contains "more than 20,000 selections dating back to 1924."
  • ArtStor Public Collections "provides faculty and students with a complete image resource in a wide array of subjects with the breadth and depth to add context beyond the confines of your discipline."
  • Book Cover Archive features page of book covers for the "appreciation and categorization of excellence in book cover design."  It also includes lines to individual designers' professional websites. 
  • Brand New documents and provides "opinions on corporate and brand identity work. We cover redesigns and new designs of notable products, companies, services, and organizations across all industries and locations."
  • Brands of the World is a gallery of world-famous brand logos, which allows "designers to access vector-forms of the well-known brand-logos that they can use in their presentations, given the permission of the copyright owner."
  • Calisphere: UC Library's Digital Collections "provides free access to unique and historically important artifacts for research, teaching, and curious exploration. Discover over one million photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more." 
  • CoverBrowser is a gallery of over 450,000 displays of covers for comic books, books, pulp, games, DVDs, and magazines. 
  • The Graphic Design Archive (GDA) "at Rochester Institute of Technology documents and preserves the work of significant American graphic designers active from the 1920s to the 1960s, as well as selected contemporary designers working in the modernist traditions." 
  • Graphic Design & Publishing Center covers "ideas, tips and tricks, and concepts for graphic design, printing, and publishing of all kinds. We touch on the type, logos, illustration, graphics, layout, page set-up, and pre-press topics -- including Adobe InDesign, Quark XPress, Adobe Illustrator, and others."
  • Vintage Ad Browser "aims to collect vintage ads from a variety of sources, including comic books, CD-Roms, websites, APIs, your submissions, book, magazine & comic book scans, and more. At the moment, this site contains 123,310 ads."
  • Web Design Museum "exhibits over 1,600 carefully selected and sorted web sites that show web design trends between the years 1991 and 2006."