LibGuides: Art & Music: Graphic Art, Design, & Photography

Graphic Design Background Sources

History of Graphic Design
An online encyclopedia tracing graphic design from the development of symbols and handwriting to post-modern and post-industrial design.
Graphic Arts Techniques
Created by a faculty member at Parkland College, this site includes an online presentation providing an overview of the history of graphic design.
Graphic Design Principles Index
From Duke University, an informative index to and explanations of the main principles of graphic design.
Open Directory: Graphic Design
The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. Note that the site is now static and is not being updated.
Top 100 Graphic Design Blogs
Useful for students and professional graphic designers, this is a list of blogs written by professionals and freelancers that contain information on everything from jobs to resources, as well as inspiration.

Find Graphic Art & Design on the Web

You can also find graphic design resources in the general art resources.

Ad*Access From Duke University, images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Located at Yale University, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has digitized a portion of its collection and makes it available on its website, including a tremendous amount of graphic art represented by lobby cards, posters and more.
British Library Images Online British Library Images Online is a unique resource for picture buyers, graphic designers and publishers, enabling users to license thousands of high quality images from the British Library's unparalleled collections.
Emergence of Advertising in America From Duke University, a collection of over 2,800 advertising items and publications dating from 1850 to 1920, illustrating the rise of consumer culture and the birth of a professionalized advertising industry in the United States.
Gallery of Graphic Design Browse advertising graphic design from the 1930s through the 1960s by year or by product, publication, illustrator and more.
Graphic Design from the 1920s and 1930s A virtual online gallery that displays a collection of 1920s and 1930s travel-related ephemera.
Graphic Design Principles Index From Duke University, an informative index to and explanations of the main principles of graphic design.
History of Graphic Design An online encyclopedia tracing graphic design from the development of symbols and handwriting to post-modern and post-industrial design.
Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog Provides access to 1.25 million digital images and to more than 600,000 group- and item-level descriptions covering about 75% of the 14 million photographs, prints, posters, cartoons, and architectural materials in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division holdings.
Princeton Graphic Arts Collection The Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton includes artists' and private press books, as well as materials for the study of paper and papermaking, printing, calligraphy, printmaking, fine binding, typography, and book design.
A Selection of Web-Accessible Collections From the Harvard University Library.
Victoria & Albert Museum Collections “Search for over 20,000 works and over 26,000 images from the V&A’s collections, including ceramics, fashion, furniture, glass, metalwork, paintings, photographs, prints, sculpture, and textiles.”
World Digital Library Significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials.

Photography Sources

Center for Creative Photography Located at the University of Arizona Libraries, the Center for Creative Photography is a research institution with a robust program of exhibitions and public lectures. It is the largest institution in the world devoted to documenting the history of North American photography and includes archives of over 200 photographers, scholars, galleries, and organizations, comprised of 4.5 million items, complemented by an unparalleled collection of over 90,000 fine prints.
Daguerreotypes from the Library of Congress There are approximately 700 daguerreotypes in the LOC's Prints & Photographs Division. The majority of the images are portraits, but the collection does include a few early architectural views, outdoor scenes, and copies of works of art.
George Eastman House Photography Collection The photography collection includes more than 400,000 photographs and negatives dating from the invention of photography to the present day. The collection embraces numerous landmark processes, objects of great rarity, and monuments of art history that trace the evolution of the medium as a technology, as a means of scientific and historical documentation, and as one of the most potent and accessible means of personal expression of the modern era.
Getty Images
Getty Images allows you to search archival picture and film collections, including the Hulton Picture Archive, National Geographic, Time Life, Bridgeman Art Library.
Harry Ransom Center Digital Collections The Harry Ransom Center is an internationally renowned humanities research library and museum. Its extensive holdings provide a unique record of the creative process of writers and artists, deepening our understanding of literature, photography, film, art, and the performing arts.
Library of Congress American Memory Project
The American Memory Project provides access to multimedia collections of digitized documents, photographs, recorded sound, moving pictures, and text from the Library's Americana collections.
Metropolitan Museum of Art Digital Collections
The Met has digitized much of its collections and makes extensive images freely available on the web.
MFA Images
Search or browse more than 160,000 images from the collection of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.
Museum of Contemporary Photography Founded by Columbia College Chicago in 1976, the museum collaborates with artists, photographers, communities, and institutions locally, nationally, and internationally. As the leading photography museum in the Midwest, presenting projects and exhibitions and acquiring works that embrace a wide range of contemporary aesthetics and technologies, the museum offers students, educators, research specialists, and general audiences an intimate and comprehensive visual study center.
Museum of Modern Art Online Collection
Browse over 1,000 digitized works of art in MoMA's collection. Also searchable by artist, work or keyword.
National Gallery of Art Online Collections
The National Gallery of Art's digital collection can be searched for a specific artist, title, or both.
New York Public Library Digital Collections NYPL Digital Collections provide free and open access to over 800,000 images digitized from The New York Public Library's vast collections, including illuminated manuscripts, historical maps, vintage posters, rare prints, photographs and more.
New York Public Library Picture Collection The NYPL Picture Collection Online presents more than 30,000 digitized images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, mostly created before 1923.
Shared Shelf Commons Shared Shelf Commons is a free, open-access library of images from libraries, archives, and museums around the world. Search and browse collections with tools to zoom, print, export, and share images.
Shorpy Historical Photo Archive Most of the photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs, 20 to 200 megabytes in size) from the Library of Congress research archive. Includes thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to the 1950s.
Texas Digital Archive The Texas State Archives’ Prints and Photographs collection includes over 750,000 original images in a variety of processes and formats. The majority of the Prints and Photographs collections relate to Texas history and important Texas figures or events.
Wikimedia Commons All of the images you'll find here have clear information about permission for use. Many are in the public domain.

American Museum of Photography
Virtual museum that includes a research center, images and more.
Griffin Museum of Photography
Located in Winchester, MA, the Griffin Museum of Photography is a nonprofit organization dedicated solely to the art of photography.
International Center of Photography
The International Center of Photography is a museum and school dedicated to the understanding and appreciation of photography.
Museum of Contemporary Photography
Founded by Columbia College Chicago in 1976, the museum collaborates with artists, photographers, communities, and institutions locally, nationally, and internationally. As the leading photography museum in the Midwest, presenting projects and exhibitions and acquiring works that embrace a wide range of contemporary aesthetics and technologies, the museum offers students, educators, research specialists, and general audiences an intimate and comprehensive visual study center.
National Archives The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation's record keeper. and preserves documents and materials, including photographs, created in the course of business conducted by the federal government.
National Geographic Photography and Photos of the Day
Includes animals, nature and weather, people, travel and much more.
Southeast Museum of Photography
The museum opened in 1992 and is one of 13 facilities in the US dedicated exclusively to photography, and one of only a handful of such institutions nationally, that share a scope, reach and depth of collection and activities in this specific field.
Women in Photography
Women in Photography is an innovative website founded by artists Amy Elkins and Cara Phillips and features the work of international female artists.

Blind Spot
Blind Spot creates unique opportunities for living artists to present significant new photographic work by providing unmediated platforms where their vision can be expressed without compromise, free of commercial content or editorialization.
British Journal of Photography Includes news, reviews, images and more.
International Journal of the Image
The International Journal of the Image interrogates the nature of the image and functions of image-making. This cross-disciplinary journal brings together researchers, theoreticians, practitioners and teachers from a wide array of areas of interest.
Nature Photographer Magazine
Photography techniques, nature photography articles, outdoor photography.

One of the best ways to discover the perfect source for your topic is to browse the library stacks by call number range. Each call number range represents a particular subject and all of the books on a particular topic will be located in the same general area on the shelves. So if you want a book on darkroom techniques, go to the call number range beginning with TR287 to see what we have!

LC Call Number	Subject
TR 1-1050	Photography
TR 250-265	Cameras
TR 287-500	Photographic processing. Darkroom techniques
TR 510-545	Color photography
TR 550-581	Studio and laboratory
TR 590-620	Lighting
TR 624-835	Applied photography. Including artistic, commercial, medical photography, photocopying processes