Graphicacy is concerned with the capacities people require in order to interpret and generate information in the form of graphics.

Our society is becoming increasingly reliant on graphics to communicate information. Until recently, words and numbers were the main vehicles for communication - compared with graphics, they have long been relatively easy to produce and distribute. However, advances in information and communications technology and visualization techniques now mean that graphics are far more readily available and widely used than ever before. The 21st century is an age in which graphic communication is becoming essential for informed citizens, much as those in previous centuries needed to be literate and numerate. Today's citizens must be able to comprehend the information graphics produced by others and this requires that they interpret such information appropriately. However, it is also becoming important that people can present information effectively to others by means of graphics they have generated themselves.

Interpretation of graphics is loosely analogous to the process of reading text, while generation of graphics is the counterpart of writing text. However, these analogies should not be taken too far because text and graphics are based on very different symbol systems. For example, whereas text is structured according to formal organisational rules that apply irrespective of the content, this is not the case for graphics. With text structure, the units of information (words) are expected to be organised according to broad conventions (such as being sequenced in orderly rows starting from top left and progressing down the page). However graphics are not subject to a similarly stringent set of structural conventions. Instead, it is the content itself that largely determines the nature of the graphic entities and the way they are arranged. For example, the form and spatial arrangement of the items that comprise the actual subject matter being represented in the graphic are used as the basis for the graphic entities and structure that are displayed in the graphic. This is not the case with written text where the words and their arrangement bear no resemblance to the represented subject matter. Because of these and other fundamental differences between text and graphics, it is appropriate that the processes involved in comprehension and production of graphics are clearly distinguished from those involved in comprehension and production of text.