Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
Machines and their developing technology are now used so frequently in the design industry I believe there will come a time in the near future where the machine is the only tool used in design, and humans may not even be needed anymore to help with the design process. As newer and more advanced programmes are introduced more artists and designers are using them as their ‘tool’, this is also because a computer, colour printer, scanner, modem and design package can cost as little as £1,500, and the majority of artists take advantage of this and the creative possibilities it can offer.
Gallery owners, they people who are commissioned to sell design/artwork are uncertain whether it is right to sell computer-generated work, they question if it is ethically correct to sell computer-generated work as fine art. The question is will technology become so clever that it can design everything itself, or for the final design to be successful does the computer also be able to think – like a human. “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” Donna Haraway’s interpretation of our time to come and that we as humans will develop to become part of the world of technology ourselves.
Will there become a stage where computer can also think? Research has already been done to determine whether or not a computer can ‘think’, part of this research was known as the “Turing test” provided by Alan Turing, he blinded folded a group of humans and told them to ask questions, these questions were then answered by either a computer or a human being and if the human could not distinguish the difference between a answer from a human or a computer then the machine was showing intelligent known as thinking.
Tags: Creative, Design, Design Industry, Future Design, Technology
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Tuesday, December 30th, 2008
Graphic images do not normally have a continuous tone unless a gradient has been used within the graphic. Graphics are drawings are not like photos plus they usually use few colours, less than 16 colours in the whole image. In a colour graphic cartoon, a particular area of colour will use one shade, where as in a photograph there may be numerous shades of one colour.
A map is produced using graphics and only uses 4 - 5 map colours plus 1 - 2 colours of text and then blue water and white paper, so these types of graphics use less than 16 colours, Graphics like this are ideal for Indexed Colour.
The TIFF file format is the best image file to use when best quality is required, and this is why the TIFF is common in professional and commercial printing environments. High Quality large JPG images are also good too, but they can be ruined if they are made too small. The 2D digital image is split into two parts, images know as ‘bitmapped’ are usually used in image making programmes such as Photoshop or painting packages, bitmap images are usually made up of rectangle picture elements known as pixels and each pixel is a colour, if the image is enlarged you can see these pixels and the image appears jagged, this can be improved by increasing the number of pixels per inch, known as a higher resolution image.
The other part is known as a ‘vector’ image and these are used in drawing and illustration programmes like Adobe Illustrator, a vector image is made up using lines and shapes, if the vector image is enlarged the quality will not degrade and the smoothness of the final image is only determined by the output device used to print the image.
Tags: Digital Images, Graphic Design, Image Formats, TIFF Files
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Monday, December 22nd, 2008
Before machines became so advanced and mechanical reproduction was introduced, duplicates of art works high in demand were made by being copied by hand, the artists would sometimes create numerous versions of a painting or made very similar replicas, but the usual occurrence would be that students, apprentices or assistants produced the copies.
Handmade copies were using just as sort after as the original, but there were obvious drawbacks to this technique being the artist would have to pay the person who produced the copies a good wage, so it was expensive, time – consuming and involved hard labour. And still there is only a few of the copies made and they were never exact but usually just a translation or an interpretation of the original.
The need to multiply an image or a design has become more popular as the design world and industry has developed, it is hard to believe that people would actually sit and reproduce the same thing over and over by hand now we are living in a world full of high quality colour printers and photocopiers, we take for granted the easy method of reproduction, you can scan a piece of work into a computer and print it 1,000 times over in a matter of a few minutes.
This also is a example of how the digital era is making us as human creatives lazy, and the appreciation of an original piece of artwork or design is becoming almost unheard of due the fact artwork is repeatedly reprinted in art books, on canvas and even onto cups and mouse mats, all these factors result in loosing the ‘special’ element of seeing the artwork.
Tags: Design, graphics, handmade, Images, machines, original
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Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
Most user interactyions with Web pages involve navigating hypertext links between documents. The main interface problem in websites is the lack of sense of where you are within the local organisation of information.
Clear, consistant icons, graphic identity schemes and graphic or text based information and summary screens can give the user confidence that they can find what they are looking for without wasting their time.
The user should always be able to return easily to your home page and to other major navigation points in the site. These basic links should be present and in consistenet locations on every page. Graphic buttons will provide basic navigation links and create a graphic identity that tells users they are within the site domain.
Tags: Clear Navigation for design, Design, graphics, icons
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