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The Evolution of Digital Art

May 19th, 2011

Until the late 20th century, the graphic-design discipline had been based on hand-craft processes: layouts that were drawn by hand in order to bring into being a design; type was specified and ordered from a typesetter; and type proofs and photostats of images were placed in position on heavy paper or card for photo copying and platemaking. Over the course of the 1980s and early ’90s, however, rapid changes in digital pc hardware and software radically changed graphic design.

Software for Apple’s 1984 Macintosh pc, such as the MacPaint program developed by computer programmer Bill Atkinson and graphic designer Susan Kare, had a revolutionary human interface. Tool icons controlled by a mouse or graphics tablet allowed designers and artists to use computer graphics in a new, intuitive way. The Postscript™ page-description language from Adobe Systems, Inc., enabled pages of type and images to be assembled into graphic designs on-screen. By the mid-1990s, the development of design from drafting-table action to an on-screen computer action was practically complete.

Digital computers placed typesetting tools into the hands of individual designers, and therefore a period of experimentation began in the creation of new and unusual type and page layouts. Type and graphics were layered, fragmented, and disfigured; type columns were overlapped and run at very long or short line lengths, and the sizes, weights, and fonts were often changed within single headlines, columns, and words. Much of this research took place in design training at art schools and universities. American designer David Carson, art director of Beach Culture magazine in 1989-91, Surfer in 1991-92, and Ray Gun magazine in 1992-96, captured the imagination of a youthful audience by taking this kind of experimental approach into graphic design.

Rapid growth in onscreen software also enabled designers to make elements transparent; to stretch, scale, and bend elements; to layer type and images in space; and to amalgamate imagery into complex montages. For example, in a United States postage stamp from 1998, designers Ethel Kessler and Greg Berger digitally montaged John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Frederick Law Olmsted with a photo of New York’s Central Park, a site plan, and botanical art to commemorate the landscape architect. Placed together, these images show a rich expression of Olmsted’s life and work.

The electronic advancement in graphic design was followed quickly by public access to the Internet. A whole new operation of graphic-design activity developed in the mid-1990s when internet commerce became a growing sector of the global economy, causing organizations and businesses to scramble to establish websites. Designing a Web site involves the layout of screens of information rather than of pages, but approaches to the use of type, images, and colour are similar to those used for print. Web design, however, requires a number of new considerations, including designing for navigation through the site and for using hypertext links to jump to additional information. An example of strong Web design is the Herman Miller for the Home Web site, designed by BBK Studio in 1998. These designers developed a strong visual identity, effective navigation, and informational clarity. Attributes that added to the effectiveness of this Web site included a consistent colour palette, an informative use of pictures of products, and a scrolling montage of products.

Because of the world-wide effectiveness and reach of the Internet, the graphic-design domain is becoming increasingly global in scope. Moreover, the integration of motion graphics, animation, video feeds, and music into website design has caused the merging of traditional print and broadcast media. As kinetic media expands from motion pictures and basic television to scores of cable-television channels, video games, and animated Web sites, motion graphics are becoming an increasingly important area of graphic design.

In the 21st century, graphic design is universal; it is the main component of our complex print and electronic information systems. It permeates contemporary society, bringing information, product identification, entertainment, and persuasive messages. The inexorable advancing of technology has changed dramatically the way graphic designs are created and distributed to a mass market. However, the basic role of the graphic designer, providing expressive form and clarity of content to communicate messages, remains the same.

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What is Action painting?

November 9th, 2010

Action painting is a direct, instinctive, and extremely dynamic type of painting that involves the erratic use of fast paced, extensive brushstrokes and the chance effects of dripping or spilling paint on the artwork. The label was coined by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg in attempting to label the work at the hands of a group of American Abstract Expressionists (see Abstract Expressionism) who had been using the method since about 1950. Action painting is distinguishable from the intricately conceptual pieces of the “abstract imagists” and “colour-field” painters, which consists of the other key direction implied in Abstract Expressionism and can resemble Action painting only in the likewise absolute emphasis to unfettered personal expression free of the traditional aesthetic or social values.

The artworks of the Action painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Jack Tworkov display the presence of the “automatic” techniques that progressed in Europe through the 1920s and ’30s by the Surrealists. While Surrealist automatism (q.v.), which involved scribblings created without the artist’s conscious concepts, was conceptually designed to awaken unconscious associations in the viewer, the automatic approach of the Action painters was primarily conceived as a process of giving the artist’s instinctive creative forces free reign and of displaying these forces directly to the viewer. In Action painting, the act of painting itself being the purity of the artist’s personal interaction with his brush, was as significant as the completed artwork.

It is generally seen that Jackson Pollock’s abstract drip paintings, seen from 1947, threw open the bolder, gestural techniques that were particular to Action painting. The intense brushstrokes of de Kooning’s “Woman” series, begun in the early 50s, successfully transgressed a richly emotive, expressive form. Action painting would have major significance in the 50s in Abstract Expressionism, with the most significant art movement at the time in the US. By the 1960s, however, leadership of the movement had moved to the colour-field and abstract imagist painters, the followers of whom in the 1960s pushed against the unconventionality of the Action painters.

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