Suppose you want to announce or sell something, amuse or persuade someone, explain a complicated system or demonstrate a process. In other words, you have a message you want to communicate. How do you "send" it? You could tell people one by one or broadcast by radio or loudspeaker. That's verbal communication. But if you use any visual medium at all – if you make a poster; type a letter; create a business logo, a magazine ad, or an album cover; even make a computer printout – you are using a form of visual communication called graphic design.

Graphic designers work with drawn, panted, photographed, or computer-generated images (pictures), but they also design the letterforms that make up various typefaces found in movie credits and TV ads; in books, magazines and menus; and even on computer screens. Designers create, choose and organize these elements – typography, images and the so-called "white-space" around them to communicate a message. Graphic design is a part of your daily life. From humble things like gum wrappers to huge things like billboards to the T-shirt you’re wearing, graphic design informs, persuades, organizes, stimulates, locates, identifies, attracts attention and provides pleasure.

Graphic Design is a creative process that combines art and technology to communicate ideas. The designer works with a variety of communication tools in order to convey a message from a client to a particular audience. The main tools are image and typography.

The term computer graphics includes almost everything on computers that is not text or sound. Today almost every computer can do some graphics, and people have even come to expect to control their computer through icons and pictures rather than just by typing.

Here in our lab at the Program of Computer Graphics, we think of computer graphics as drawing pictures on computers also called rendering. The pictures can be photographs, drawings, movies, or simulations – pictures of things which do not yet exist and maybe could never exist. Or they may be pictures from places we cannot see directly, such as medical images from inside your body.

We spend much of our time improving the way computer pictures can simulate real world scenes. We want images on computers to not just look more realistic, but also to BE more realistic in their colors, the way objects and rooms are lighted, and the way different materials appear. We call this work "realistic image synthesis", and the following series of pictures will show some of our techniques in stages from very simple pictures through very realistic ones.