Mrs. Briggs

  graph·ic de·sign (n)

The art or skill of combining text and pictures in advertisements, magazines, or books.

While Graphic Design as a discipline has a relatively recent history, first coined by William Addison Dwiggins in 1922,graphic design-like activities span the history of humankind: from the caves of Lascaux, to Rome's Trajan's Column to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. 

The essence of graphic design is to give order to information, form to ideas, expression and feeling to artifacts that document human experience.

- Phillip Meggs, A History of Graphic Design

Le Chat Naoir by Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, 1896