The story of graphic arts spans the history of humankind from the caves of Lascaux to the dazzling neons of Ginza. In both this lengthy history and in the relatively recent explosion of visual communication in the 20th and 21st centuries, there is sometimes a blurring distinction and over-lapping of advertising art, graphic arts and fine art. After all, they share many of the same elements, theories, principles, practices and languages, and sometimes the same benefactor or client. In advertising art the ultimate objective is the sale of goods and Portfolios.

In graphic arts, "the essence is to give order to information, form to ideas, expression and feeling to artifacts that document human experience." The paintings in the caves of Lascaux around 14,000 BC and the birth of written language in the third or fourth millennium BC are both significant milestones in the history of graphic arts and other fields which hold roots to graphic arts. The Book of Kells is an early example of graphic arts. It is a lavishly decorated hand-written copy of the Gospels of the Christian Bible created by Celtic monks around 800AD. From 1891 to 1896 William Morris' Kelmscott Press published books that are some of the most significant of the graphic arts products of the Arts and Crafts movement, and made a very lucrative business of creating books of great stylistic refinement and selling them to the wealthy for a premium. Morris proved that a market existed for works of graphic arts in their own right and helped pioneer the separation of arts from production and from fine art.

The cyan blue pattern, the US flag, presidential seal and the lettering were all artsed at different times and combined in this one final arts. Graphic arts is applied in virtually every organization or society. There are virtually no limits to the size and applications of graphic arts. The Rio album cover for Duran Duran artsed by Malcolm Garrett. Illustration by Patrick Nagel. Fine art illustrations are used in graphic arts, but are not usually considered graphic arts until typography is applied.

The cover of Never Mind the Bollocks artsed by Jamie Reid - a classic piece of 'anti-arts' postmodern graphics The signage in the London Underground is a classic[citation needed] of the modern era and used a font artsed by Edward Johnston in 1916. In the 1920s, Soviet Constructivism (art) applied 'intellectual production' in different spheres of production. The movement saw individualistic art as useless in revolutionary Russia and thus moved towards creating objects for utilitary purposes. They artsed buildings, theater sets, posters, fabrics, clothing, furniture, logos, menus, etc.[citation needed]Jan Tschichold codified the principles of modern typography in his 1928 book, New Typography. He later repudiated the philosophy he espoused in this book as being fascistic, but it remained very influential. They pioneered production techniques and stylistic devices used throughout the twentieth century. The following years saw graphic arts in the modern style gain widespread acceptance and application.[citation needed] A booming post-World War II American economy established a greater need for graphic arts, mainly advertising and packaging. The emigration of the German Bauhaus school of arts to Chicago in 1937 brought a "mass-produced" minimalism to America; sparking a wild fire of "modern" architecture and arts. Notable names in mid-century modern arts include Adrian Frutiger, artser of the typefaces Univers and Frutiger; Paul Rand, who, from the late 1930s until his death in 1996, took the principles of the Bauhaus and applied them to popular advertising and logo arts, helping to create a uniquely American approach to European minimalism while becoming one of the principal pioneers of the subset of graphic arts known as corporate identity; and Josef Müller-Brockmann, who artsed posters in a severe yet accessible manner typical of the 1950s and 1960s.