Why is graphic design so popular these days?

There was once a time when the term “graphic design” was not commonplace at the family dinner table. Now one can take classes in design at community colleges across the country. So what changed? Why is it so trendy to study graphic design in particular? Is it fair to say that western culture has become decreasingly literary as a whole, while at the same time more accepting of the use of images to communicate? Many signs point to that assumption. Newspapers and magazines nowadays have an overwhelmingly higher percentage of pictures than those from fifty years ago. Mass media saturation must be an essential player in changing the average American’s psychology. Technology has always changed the way people communicate. Just as the advent of printing drove the written word away from pictorial resemblance, the upsurge of new media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has made us accustomed to visual implications, rather than the audio-based phonic nature of the English alphabet. As a natural result of this cultural shift, the demand for visual communicators has gone up. The number of applications for graphic design has increased in the information age, and subsequently the number of schools offering the study has gone up. In response to this, many college-age students think making visuals will be easy, (which very well may be a vestige of printing-age society’s tendency to demote picture-making to mere child’s play). This new perception of graphic design has led to its popularity, but at the same time may dilute its potency if too many people go into the field for the wrong reasons.