From For the Hearts

Steven Pinker coined the term “Euphemism Treadmill”. It explains the linguistic process known as pejoration.

So what happened to graphic design? Did it develop negative connotations or lose positive ones? Or are we rather talking about a semantic shift, as it occurs as a word moves from one set of circumstances to another, resulting in an extension of the range of meanings?

A bit of both happened. Industrialisation of the printing industry was the birth of graphic design as we know it today. When there was only movable type there was only typography and illustration. When lithographical methods were industrialised graphic design was born. When public relation and modern advertising was born it didn't create 'art direction' as a euphemism for 'graphic design'. What it did was to appropriate the skill-set of the typographers, graphic designer and illustrators of the time and coin it under its own name.

The recent transformation of 'graphic design' into 'visual communication' on the other hand seems entirely unnecessary. Definitions only seem to have their arbitrariness in common. Some tend towards 'visual communication' as a meta-category for all the fields within two dimensional applied art, whereas others use it instead of 'graphic design'.