[asmodie]

Are art and design the same thing? Are both things an artistic skill? What is the difference? And does one come with the other?

You'r probably goning to hate me now. But, I haven't seen alot of god designed home pages here. Even this forum is just a copy of a standard forum, nothing thats makes it special, exept the content.

I se lots of god art in here, and when see them I think "WOW!". There are grat artist in here. But when I click on a link to a home page, I regrett it.

If i hade the ability to draw as half god as the most ppl do here, I would make killer websites. But maby thats not a challange enough.

Why is my question to you?


Murphys law:
" Everyting that can go wrong, will go wrong!"

"And if it haven't gone wrong, they have probably not told you yet"

[Jerry]

My definition for art is: something with inner and outer beauty no specific topic or subject. Design: a creation for purpose and/or fun that doesn't need inner beauty and needs a topic/subject.

[waylon]

Yes, there are a lot of aspects of art and design that overlap. But art tends to be more for its own sake, and design tends to be the more practical aspect. Dunno. I'm sure you can get a thousand different opinions on this. But as far as your comment on this forum being just "a copy of a standard forum"... that's because it works well. All of the features you need to get to are easily accessible. It doesn't take an hour to load a page. THAT'S good design.

[Flinthawk]

I know what you mean when you say that people here have amazing art but then have some lackluster websites...I'm one of them =P The same goes the other way as well. I think that art and design are different but are both important to each other. You can have one without the other but the result won't be as good as if you had both going for you in a particular project. That's just my opinion though.

I think I'm becoming a fairly decent artist, I mean I'm getting paid to do art so I must be ok, but I know I'm lacking basic knowledge on smart design, particularly when it comes to webpages. Personally, I'd like to take a class on the side to learn about webpage development so I can make a cool webpage to show off my work but for now I'm stuck with a fairly basic page I threw together just to get an online portfolio going. http://www.digipen.edu/~tstamm In defense of myself I can only say that what is there is a little dated compared to what I can do now but I have little time to worry about a cool looking webpage when it's not what I do for a living...I'd rather my actual artwork speak for me. This could be the case for others here as well. But now I'm rambling and I need to get back to work, heh.

-Flinthawk

[spooge demon]

I am anale retentivf, famed swiss graphic designer. I cry for the soiled page full of bad type with and abysmal layout. It is a crime, an assault on the soul. I see a plain white beautiful page, and it speaks to me in soft whispers, �I am your chosen one, lay me over a chair and have your way! Lay your fecund Helvetica *here!* and no place else...�

[balistic]

I could either spend my time making cool art, or making a cool web page. I don't even have enough time to make a tenth of the art that I want to, so you'd better believe that my web page isn't going to be anything "cutting edge."

As long as it doesn't impede the viewing of the artwork contained in it, a gallery-type web site is doing its job. So many way-kewl flash-to-the-max galleries make me wade through endless arrays of jittery icons only to present me with 600-pixel-wide "browser friendly" artwork that pops up in a Java window so I can't save it without hitting prntscrn and cropping it out of the GUI in Photo-Paint.

What a lot of web designers call "good designs", I call "atrocious impediments to the display of artwork."

Go to a real-world gallery, and you can bet that the entrance is going to be clearly marked, the pictures and installations well-lit, and the lobby free of poorly-looped stock breakbeats.



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Brian "balistic" Prince
3D Artist
Eggington Productions
http://www.bprince.com

[samdragon]

art and design hu?
Here is my personal take on that.
Art is usually, but not always about the person doing it. Where as Illustration is more about the character involved or the story being told. This subject could go on forever
Design is a pretty broad subject. So I'll talk generally about it
Design involves alot of thinking as to placement, layout (layout could be traditional or informal). The concept of type and image working together is a big part of design.
As for webdesign, it seems that most people are more concerned with the technology behind it right now. Few are actually looking at webpage as graphic design. People are more concerned with "how many bells and whistles can I pack into this screen?" There are good sites out there, and they are good for many reasons, but mainly because the person designing them has a good sense of design and composition.
How many times have you went to a website that has a bazillion lines of text that go across the page. It's pretty hard to stop at one word that ends on the very right of your screen and then go all the way back to the left of your screen and start the next line. This is a big reason why most people use centered justification for their text.The leading is horrible, the kerning is non existent and the fonts are limited to what the general public has on their system, unless you are using Flash.
How many web designers know what a "widow" is or dare I say it "columns for text"

So, next comes the big question. If all you want to show is your artwork, why the hell would you be so concerned with detailed layout and design. You're showing your talent as an artist, not a graphic designer. So you site should not take away from it's content and it should be simple and easy to navigate, Make everything upfront and in plain view.

As for design in art, yes there is plenty of it. It's called composition. If you had the same image and one was composed well while the other one was just stagnant and centered with a flat background, the one that is composed better will have more reaction from the viewer. You can paint all your life, but if you don't understand even the simplest parts of design, you paintings will all be boring and must rely heavily on the subject matter. Even abstract painters know that bad composition can ruin a painting.

When you visit a web page, are you visiting it for the content or are you visiting it for the sake of it being a web page?

[samdragon]

hahaha spooge!
LMAO!

[Plop]

Actually i can relate to that. On my first job i was almost fired for slightly stretching fonts sideways in photoshop to match the borders of the table.

"If you stretch fonts again you can look for another job"

"Do not ever use Comic Sans Serif again!"

"What is it with you and these non-standart fonts?!"

She had whole adobe type library memorized by name.

[Francis]

This discussion reminds me of a passage from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, where he's describing a chair (I think), but the description fits well with some of the sites I've seen. I'm paraphrasing because I loaned my copy to a friend and I don't have access to a copy right now, so forgive me if I mangle it -

"...looks like it was conceived by a bald Finnish designer with six thousand dollar rimless glasses and dual Ph.Ds in semiotics and civil engineering..."

Anyway, I laughed for days after reading that passage, and I knew it would apply to so many other things.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I try to keep my site as simple as possible, so it's easy to update and easy to get to the art. Whether I've accomplished that is debatable, but personally I would rather put my spare time into making new drawings or paintings than crunching HTML. Definitely lower priority for me.

------------------
Francis Tsai
TeamGT Studios

[asmodie]

I'm a little suprised that so many replied.
But thats good.

Some awnsers to what you said...
No this is not a good forum in the way it is used. Personaly I'm working on my own forum concept, for grafical use. . That I'll probably program i php, and the fist version will be out in the beginning of 2001. Hopefully...

It is easy to make a homepage, that is cool, flashy in a art kind of way. Or do it in Flash. But thats not the way of good design, are good at deigning homepages.

Hehehe....maby one of you like to work under me. I do the design concept you draw.

Would you like me to make a turtorial on what to think about when designing a home page? And how to do it?

[chumps]

ok...

[Joachim]

My personal opinion, I don't like spending time doing design because I find it immensely boring, atleast pure design work. I feel that I wate my time.
Art and design are two different occupations, so it's stupid to compare them. Very often a designer lacks of drawing skills and of course and artist working with drawing stuff, has often less expertise in design.
This might sound stupid, I don't think/and I'm glad that a person that that are capable of paint draw what he puts his mind to choose not to work with fonts and layout and such...
I find no pleasure and don't understand phmanipulation with fancy fonts and blending colors and so to be any interessting at all. I guess there's something in it that I don't understand. (hehe, this illustration fits here too )


I for one will never join a design-focused forum like you are planning to put up, sounds way to boring for me. I can't see how you can say this forum is bad, when this is the only one I've found in it's quality, where people meet to discuss art in a more openminded spirit. There's a plenty of those forums that you have in mind out there, and most of them suck.

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Joachim's Place

[samdragon]

common rule in design...
if it aint broke, don't fix it!
i think this forum is great, it loads quick, there is no clutter and it serves it's purpose. Why would you want to change this place anyway? It's doing it's job, look at all the members and how much it has grown. I don't think adding fancy buttons and flash animations would increase it's popularity. People come here for the artists and to share ideas, not to look at the web page.

[time_101]

quote:

---

Originally posted by asmodie:
Even this forum is just a copy of a standard forum, nothing thats makes it special, exept the content.

---

A site with a flashy interface and no content is more crappy than a page with content but a "boring" interface. Regardless of how much time you spend making your page look artistic and unique, the whole point of a web page is the content.

I (and most everyone else on the web) prefer people who focus more on the content than their interface because those are the sites that make me come back. If I spend 5 minutes roaming around a website and find no content, I won't come back, no matter how cool the interface. If the person has a confusing interface where I can't find the content or it takes too long to load, I won't come back.

The simplest designs are the best, they always have been and they always will be. People learned this in print media and have stuck to it (no one ever complains that an index or table of contents in a book isn't cool looking or artistic), and we're learning it now with web design. Take a look at the professional sites -- all the big ones are simple -- you can always find what you want intuitively because there is a standard format that people expect. Boring? For some yes, but as long as it works and works well, we'll keep coming back if there's content to support it. That's design.

[nightmare]

it is possible to be simple yet not boring. look at feng's webpage for example. i don't have his url handy but im sure someone does. he has an awesome site. and yet there isn't a crappy midi or flash animation in sight. this is good design. and its great art. so there!

also, in design u need to think about composition the same way u think of composition in art. is it too busy? do people know where to look? r they looking at that spaykly thing when they should be looking at the contents? does it offend the eye colorwise, etc? in this way they are very similar, art and design. but as in art and design, the guy with the biggest lens flares doesn't win. who cares how much flash u have on ur site when it looks like solidified puke? im rambling now, but u get the picture.

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it's all a conspiracy!

[AKIRA_x]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Plop:
"If you stretch fonts again you can look for another job"

---

DAM RIGHT!!! I am sure you are well aware of this by now, but fonts, typography is holy, you DO NOT scale them out of propotions. A wise man told me, Times New Roman is not a font, its a virus. Since the dawn of Microsoft Word, and the standard issue font TIMES we have all been at one time or another been raped by the posting of a interoffice memo with TIMES used as both heading and text....GOD SAVE US!!

quote:

---

Originally posted by Plop:
"Do not ever use Comic Sans Serif again!"

---

Words that should be writen in stone!!!! Welded into Titanstell. WRITTEN IN GREEN NEON LIGHTS ON THE MOON!!! Stars should be aligned so when aliens read them..they see the 11th comandment, "Thou Shall not use Comic Sans Serif EVER!!!!!!"

quote:

---

Originally posted by Plop:
"What is it with you and these non-standart fonts?!"

---

ok..here she was out of line....unles your the layout dude at the New York times and thought you wanted to party up the front page of something.. :-)

AKIRA

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Whos ya dady!!

[This message has been edited by AKIRA_x (edited November 13, 2000).]

[Spitfire]

Here they fire you if you use any other font than Arial Helvetica Sans-serif.

Seriously though :

Art = art.
Design = Applied art.

The main difference between Art and Design is that Art is pure and Design is allways a compromise. Or that�s how i see it.

[asmodie]

Design is mutch more then just compromising.
Coz lots of design is made from creativity, and still loved. Som designs sux if you go by the book. But users loves it any way.

Some things that I think could get better this in forum.

1. The pics! Coz they are linked, they sometimes takes a year to load. Why don't have a upload them to the forum? I'm more user friendly, and the ppl that doesn't have access to a homepage can upload to.

2. More user info instead of asking everybody in the forum were hey work or what UNI thay have.

And there is more stuff that you could do to make a forum more specialized for grafical users.

As I said, I still love the content. But I think design can inprove the experince of the contet. And userbillity makes the content easyer to understand and easyer to access and thats design to.

[Spitfire]

Design = compromises. Allways. Design is communication and communication is about reaching people. To reach people you have to establish a standard, a threshold that everyone can cross.

[Ragnarok]

Design can be very interesting in my opinion. And I think I also has to do with composition and mixing something practic and beautiful.
[URL=http://www.deaddreamer.com]deaddreamer[URL]
It's a good place and I think it's a good design example. Maybe I'm missing the meaning of design, cause I'm not english =�

-Ragnarok

[hew]

See my site, its kinda fun .. well anyway .. It has great "toy" value .. see if you can find the guestbook

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icklepix.com

[jcterminal]

art and design are pretty close together on the scale of things.

think about it this way.... what is important when it comes to working with either?

there's colour theory... a sense of rhythm and balance... there's a message and a mood to convey.

so what's the issue with really good artists having really crappy sites? or vica versa?

that's easy to explain... they are *two completely different medias*. ask a penciller to try oil-painting for the first time. ask a photographer to try sculpting. usually it doesn't work. why? different medias. they may all follow a certain need for basic visual skills (i.e, the theories mentioned above), but this is web-design.

ask a comic-book artist to play the guitar.

it's not fair to think because he can create depth of shadow he can create a G flat melody. don't think skills with the stylus and tablet can transfer over easily to notepad and a book on javascript.

but don't think of it in negative terms, think of it in terms of an artist and a writer working together, in someways, it's almost the same situation.

and yes, part of it is designers trying to throw in every bell and whistle, but that's part of the growing process. luckily, some of us move out of it.

sometimes tho... sometimes... there's an artist that can do both 'art' and 'design', and when someone gets to a high enough level in one, and remembers the basics, he can easily carry over those skills to the next field.

so what's the moral.

*learn to walk, then you can run.... then you can run no matter what the surface is*

err... or something.

regardless, i lucked out. i have a pretty good sense of design AND an eye for art.

anyone want to see?


[This message has been edited by jcterminal (edited November 13, 2000).]

[Redbeard]

quote:

---

Originally posted by asmodie:
Even this forum is just a copy of a standard forum, nothing thats makes it special, exept the content.

---

As someone already pointed out, we'd rather have content. Personally I hate going to a site that's all flash / shockwave / java applets, but has nothing there to see. You visit a flashy site, think it's kinda cool. Go back a few days later and wonder, "Why the f*ck did I bookmark this crap?"

If people are scared away by the lack of flashy graphics, then great. They probably weren't going to add to the content anyway. One of the most visited sites on the Web, though probably not in these circles, is Slashdot. Do you think it got popular from a flashy look? God no! It looks like crap when you first see it. You get used to it. It serves it's purpose. Quick, clean, and nothing but content.

[nova]

from my experiences as disgruntled graphic artist, design is making something look pretty to the eye, art is something than is pretty but not always beautiful. something deeper that affects in a certain way the person viewing it.



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*nova
!

[asmodie]

Is userbillity design? I think so!
So design isn't only the grafical, or?
And what is the diferance in the media? Digigtal art and digital design? And art on paper and design on paper?

And does design have to be beautyfull to be loved or good in any way? No I don't think so! Coz who think pixlated fonts are beautifull? NO ONE! But they are cool

Hehe, many questions.

[hew]

I see only one person found the guestbook, or only one person bothered looking. P.s There is NO flash on my site ( some people think it does , becuase of the image preloader (I think) ).

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icklepix.com

[plant42]

Hmm... I can understand people not liking to do design, but it really hurts your work to be put in a sloppy page.
Or 'packaging counts'! I left Spooge's page the first two times I randomly stumbled on it on the net, before I came here and people were talking about it.
A lot of people will just assume if you have a poorly designed site, you'll have poor work.

plant 42

[asmodie]

Ppl are shallow.
They juge the book by the cover.
Even if you like it or not...that is the truth! A little thought I have: How did we find this forum? Though Dahbis eminent home page, what if it would looked like shit? Would we come here in the first place?

[Isric]

i personally prefer a nice, classy, simple design with kick ass content. I don't think simple= bad.
Whenever I find a page that asks "Flash or HTML?"
HTML all the way. I know it will be simple, I won't have to find what the guy thinks of as a BACK button! I won't hae to suffer through soome STUPID flash intro about the NEW WAVE of the internet, "WELCOME TO A NEW ERA OF DESIGN! THE INTERNET WILL NEVER BE THE SAME!!!!"

Can't stand it.
And I used to be part of a Flash design group.
Now its just my friend and his pal playing around.
check this out though www.liquidflash.com
pretty funny.

Simple is good. I've seen a bunch of 15-year-old-i-wanna-be-a-digital-artist-too web sites that make me pull out my hair in frustration.
The page I'm working on now? White...black letters... and great artwork. Give me simple.
That's design, being able to express ideas in a way people are attracted to them.