What are Graphics?

Question: What are Graphics?

Graphics are pictures. Artwork. Digital photographs. Vector drawings. If it's not text using a digital font, it's a graphic.

In desktop publishing we work with text and graphics. If text is the characters, words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that we read, it would be easy to say that anything that is not text is graphics. But what about graphics that are pictures of text characters and words? We read them, so they must be text not graphics, right? Not exactly.

Answer: Text, as used in desktop publishing, is a special kind of file format -- or many formats -- that the computer is able to read. For a more complete understanding, read What is Text?

In desktop publishing we use many different kinds of graphics. Our use of graphics is dependent not only on the type of graphic and its content but also on the graphics format. Words rendered in one of these graphics formats becomes a graphic, not text.

Graphics Types

Typically, graphics are considered pictures. They can be realistic, cartoonish, or stylized drawings of people, places, or objects. Graphics can be photographs taken with a digital camera or scanned from print photos. A decorative border around a page, the bullet symbols in front of a list of items, icons, a graph, or a pie chart are all graphics. A textured background designed to look like tree bark, marble, or crumbled tissue paper and a horizontal or vertical line used to separate items on a page are types of graphics. The terms clip art and graphics are often used interchangeably even though clip art is usually a more specific type of non-photographic image.

• Balloon
  a graphic device often seen in comic books
  
  
• Box, Border, Frame
  a decorative frame
  
  
• Chart, Graph
  symbolic representation of data
  
  
• Clip Art
  non-photographic graphic images
  
  
• Dingbat
  clip art in font form
  
  
• Mug Shots
  pictures of people
  
  
• Symbols, Signs, Icons
  simple, often stylized representations of ideas and actions

Graphics Formats

The format of graphics is the arrangement of the coded information -- the bits and bytes -- that tell the computer how to display and/or print the graphic image. There are two primary broad graphics formats -- bitmap graphics and vector graphics -- and within those formats are specific file formats, some of which are readable only by certain graphics software programs.

In general, photographic images are usually bitmap. Other types of graphics may be bitmap or vector. Bitmap graphics are usually created and edited with image editors such as Photoshop or Photo-Paint. Vector graphics are created and edited with illustration programs such as Illustrator or CorelDRAW.

• Bitmap
  a type of graphic composed of pixels (picture elements) in a grid
  
  
  • TIFF
  • GIF
  • JPEG
  
  
  
• Vector
  a resolution-independent, scalable format composed of individual objects made up of mathematical calculations (not as scary as it sounds)
  
  
  • EPS
  • WMF

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