For those of you who know Adam and I, you know that Adam is an amazing designer or digital media, and I’m an avid black and white, though occasionally in color, sketch artist. One thing the two of us have found since working together is that while we’re are still both functionally producing art, we have very different rules (indeed), and that clash has in the past sometimes reared it’s ugly head. In pondering it, I’ve discovered that there are some stark differences between the way a traditional artist and a digital artist approach their canvases, based upon the ultimate goals of each, and I thought I’d explore that a bit tonight, perhaps more as a musing than anything. I only ask that you please indulge me this once (more).

First of all, how a digital artist accounts for eye movements on a screen boggles my mind. Ask any traditional artist, and I’m sure they’ll explain to you that you normally want the focus of your work in one of the corners of the thirds, you want your background to be cool colors and foreground mostly warm colors, and that the eye will move towards warm colors, mostly in a circular pattern from corner of a third, to corner of a third. What do I mean by a corner of a third? Well, basically, the idea is if you take a piece of paper and fold it into thirds both horizontally and vertically you’ll have two lines going across the paper lengthwise and width-wise. This creates nine boxes in your piece of paper. The four corners of the center box are the points where traditional artists put the main subjects of their works, because these are the first places the eye sees, and because it’s much easier to create an impression on the viewer. If you look at my crudely constructed example picture to the left, you’ll see four red circles. These are the points I’m talking about. If you didn’t already know this, I invite you to peruse your local art gallery and you’ll see how prolific a technique this is. Want to make your family photos 100% better than they currently are? Take this principle to heart. Enough of putting your daughter at the center of the picture, put her face in that top left corner third, and you’ll have a real winning photo, one assumes.

Anyhow, this technique is not really something I see much in design these days, least not in design for websites. When we think of art, we don’t think of it as a conduit for information, but really, what is art if not a conduit for information (ie symbolism)? Website design, on the other hand, does not really have the luxury or just being nice looking, it has to be functional as well, meaning it has to be easy to navigate, it has to represent an organization or individual, and it has to work. The first two are fairly easily defined, but the third is not. This is an individual interpretation, in my opinion, and it’s this principle above all that separates good digital artists from great digital artists.

Now, think of the two most common website layouts on the Internet: Navigation bar down the left or along the header, whole page aligned to the left side, content rests under the header and just to the right of the left nav-bar; or the whole content is a fixed width across that rests in the center, with a tiled or solid background that fills in the extra space on the left and the right of the design. Anything that breaks out of this paradigm is edgy, unconventional, and frankly snubbed by any mainstream websites, short of mainstream anti-mainstream sites. There’s certainly a lot of play there, but as an traditional artist I’m a little confused. My canvas is white, clear, clean, pristine. It’s awaiting the first stroke of my F-type Derwent graphic pencil, and until then, I can do whatever I please. Website designers don’t have this luxury. They get a template, and while they’re not asked to color in the lines necessarily, they are still asked to at least be careful about it. For me, this is maddening.

In a word I sort of feel bad for digital designers. They’re artists at heart, but artists with fairly defined rules, I think. Adam and I, for example, have been working on a new design for Solvo because the old design was just thrown together piecemeal. I sketched something out I thought was going to be dynamite, but as I worked on it in photoshop I realized fairly early that it was horrid. We’re talking vomit inducing. Every shred of artistic premise was smashed to ribbons, outside of maybe some color theory. It was a fairly crushing defeat. I decided that working on it as a whole was probably a bad idea, and decided to break the design apart into functional members and just work on those as separate works of art, and that has worked out much better thus far, but I’ll have to put it all together eventually, and when I do, guess what I’ll do?

That’s right, I’ll dump them on Adam’s lap, because what I’ve learned is that I’m working in a parallel world that mirrors but does not reflect my values, and so long as the Internet doesn’t go retro and start asking for sketched websites, I lack the fundamental theory to produce anything that combines my traditional training, and the ultimate functional elements that a good designer and fuse.

I should probably buy a digital art theory book, but then I’d have nothing to needlessly philosophize about.