Did You Know? These Three Famous Artists Were Also Graphic Designers.

There's a stubborn myth in the creative world that "fine art" and "graphic design" live on opposite sides of a wall. Art is pure, expressive and hangs in galleries. Design is commercial, functional and sells things.

It's nonsense, of course. And the best proof is the number of celebrated artists whose fine art was shaped, sharpened and often funded by their work as graphic designers.

Here are three of our favourites.

You'd recognise Barbara Kruger's work instantly even if you didn't know her name. Bold white text, often in Futura, slammed across black-and-white photographs, usually framed in a slash of red. Phrases like "I shop therefore I am" and "Your body is a battleground". It's some of the most influential conceptual art of the last 50 years.

Before she was an artist, Kruger was a graphic designer. In the mid-1960s, after studying at Parsons under the photographer Diane Arbus, she landed a job at Condé Nast and was promoted to head designer at Mademoiselle within a year, aged just 22. She went on to work as a graphic designer and picture editor at titles including House & Garden and Aperture, spending years immersed in type, layout and the persuasive visual language of publishing.

Look at her art and you can see exactly where it came from. Kruger has said her time in design was the single biggest influence on her work. She took the tools of advertising and turned them back on themselves, using the visual grammar of magazines to critique consumerism, power and identity. Her influence runs so deep that the visual style of a certain streetwear brand's red-and-white logo is, shall we say, extremely familiar.

Jump back a century and you find one of the most famous painters of the Post-Impressionist era doing something that, at the time, many "serious" artists sneered at: making adverts.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, born into French aristocracy in 1864, turned his back on the polite art world and threw himself into the bohemian nightlife of Montmartre. And in 1891 he was commissioned to create a poster advertising the Moulin Rouge dance hall.

The result, Moulin Rouge: La Goulue, changed commercial art forever. Standing over five feet tall, printed as a colour lithograph and pasted around Paris in their thousands, it made Lautrec famous almost overnight. He stripped the image down to bold, flat blocks of colour and silhouettes, borrowing from Japanese prints, and integrated the hand-drawn lettering into the composition so that type and image became one thing rather than two.

Most posters of the day were fussy and text-heavy. Lautrec treated a commercial commission with the full force of his artistic vision, and in doing so he helped elevate the poster from throwaway advertisement to a genuine art form. He went on to make around 30 posters, and they're now studied as foundational works of modern graphic design.

Shepard Fairey is one of the most recognised image-makers alive, thanks to two things: the red, cream and blue Barack Obama "HOPE" poster of 2008, and the OBEY streetwear brand that grew out of his street art.

And Fairey isn't a fine artist who dabbled in design. He's formally trained in it. He studied illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1992, and it was there, in 1989, that he created the "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" sticker that would eventually evolve into the global OBEY phenomenon.

Worth noting, too, that the HOPE poster sparked a well-known legal case over its use of an existing news photograph, which became a landmark talking point about appropriation and copyright.

Three artists, three centuries, one lesson. Kruger, Toulouse-Lautrec and Fairey all show that the wall between art and graphic design is a fiction. The skills are the same skills. Composition, typography, colour, the ability to make an image that stops someone in their tracks and lodges in their memory.

Some of the most powerful art of the last 150 years didn't come in spite of graphic design. It came because of it. So if anyone ever tells you design is the lesser cousin of "real" art, point them here. The masters knew better.

That's exactly why we teach graphic design as a serious, expressive, world-changing discipline at Shillington. Because in the right hands, it absolutely is.

This is part of our Did You Know? series, where we explore the stories behind the world's most iconic design. Follow along on Instagram for more.