The job title was coined by a man who was trying to quit advertising.
Before 1922, the people who arranged type, illustrations, and layouts for printed materials were called commercial artists. The term carried a stigma. Fine artists dismissed commercial work as beneath them, and the people doing it had no professional language to describe what made their craft distinct.1
William Addison Dwiggins, a typographer and book designer working in Hingham, Massachusetts, wanted a different word. In an article for the Boston Evening Transcript titled "New Kind of Printing Calls for New Design," published on August 29, 1922, he used the phrase "graphic design" to describe the emerging discipline of organizing visual elements on a printed page.2
Dwiggins was not naming himself. He was naming a problem. The explosion of advertising, packaging, and mass-produced print in the early twentieth century had created work that did not fit the old categories. It was not fine art and it was not mere craft. It required decisions about type, space, hierarchy, and meaning that no existing title captured.3
The term did not catch on immediately. For decades, "commercial artist" remained the standard label. It was not until after World War II, as design programs appeared in universities and professional organizations formed, that "graphic designer" became the recognized title for the field.
Dwiggins himself never stopped designing. He created typefaces for Linotype, including Electra and Caledonia, that remain in use. His 1928 book Layout in Advertising became a standard reference for the emerging field.4
The American Institute of Graphic Arts, founded in 1914 as an organization for printers and illustrators, did not adopt the word "graphic" in its mission until years after Dwiggins coined the term. By the late twentieth century, graphic design had become one of the most common creative professions in the world.