DM112 - Graphic Design
Graphic Designers

Much of the freedom that today's designers enjoy is the result of the computer, which enables them to explore multiple approaches quickly and easily. With advanced graphics programs, type can be manipulated almost as a plastic substance--stretched, molded, turned in space, enlarged, reduced, colored, and recolored. Images, too, can be enlarged, reduced, cropped, placed, and moved. A design can be completely worked out on the computer and transmitted in digital form to the printer. More often, the computer is used as simply another tool, although a powerful one, in a design process that also includes traditional studio methods and darkroom techniques.

With the dramatic expansion of the World Wide Web and the increasing popularity of CD-ROM technology, the computer has also become an exciting new place for design. Design for the Web draws on such traditional models as posters, magazine layout, and advertising. To these it adds the potential for motion and interactivity--reactions to choices made by a visitor to the site. Indeed the same viewer examining the same CD on different days may get an entirely different order of output.

Light radiates from a computer screen as it does from a television, allowing a deeper and more luminous sense of space than traditional print media. Some designers believe that artists interested in using the computer must master the language of the computer itself, which is programming. To rely on off-the-shelf design software, they point out, is to accept the limits of someone else's imagination.

Many websites take the form of succeeding 'pages'. This way of presenting information is deeply rooted in our way of thinking, for we have been storing information on pages in books for almost 2,000 years. Yet the computer also permits a more fluid, cinematic sense of space whose graphic possibilities are only beginning to be explored. Moreover, contemporary web design shows how the new digital technology has undercut the traditional truth value of photographic images. If images are so easy to manipulate, then the camera, if it is digital, can indeed be made to lie. Seeing is no longer believing, in the traditional sense of the term.

However, the degree of sophistication of a web-based work is no indicator of its quality. As in other media, designers who are best at organizing meaningful visual information create the best web works. In short, digital design is evolving as fast as computers themselves are. Although they are working with the most advanced technology of the day, contemporary web designers are actually quite conservative for their work embraces the principles of visual elegance and communicative clarity that have been at the core of graphic design since anonymous scribes first developed writing.

Many artists and designers are beginning to take advantage of free universal www-distribution to create works expressly for viewing there. Some create works for posting to their own web pages; in addition there are several sites that specialize in exhibition web works and thus function like interactive galleries. Numerous museums have added collections of web works to their sites as well. Like other branches of digital art, web works have evolved rapidly since the first examples came out in the middle 1990s, in accordance with the increasing capabilities of web browsers and plug-in programs.