Observing ...

In the previous post, I mentioned about the creativity process I myself felt and experienced through my first work at school. Then I accidentally saw again one post in Design Observer that wrote about Graphic Design vs. Illustrator. Have to say that there is something in life you just can feel it in the right time when you already link with all the matters around it. I have read this entry once, but I just skimmed and quickly felt bored, the author mentioned some historic figures and made me go out of the point. But now, when I reread it, word by word, sentence by sentence, I could understand and begin to “observe”. When I compared and thought back what I have seen and experienced, his words really touched my feeling and there could be no better expression about them then he did.

He said: “Visual communication was colonized by tough-minded, business-driven graphic designers who gave their clients what they wanted: branding, strategy and the precision-tooled delivery of commercial messages”. I don’t want to say again what I’ve said in the previous blog but this is the reality. We go to school to learn what we expected to learn but there’s always barrier to challenge us to pass in reality.

“In a culture that values commerce above all other things, the imaginative potential of illustration has become irrelevant... Illustration is now too idiosyncratic”
Milton Glaser

Graphic design needs to do a lot with communication compared to illustration itself; therefore, graphic design was quickly adopted. Illustration, in the other hand, was thought to become too personal and related to social figures. This made me think. Why people can easily adopt what is popular but begin to struggle with what is deep and strange? We cannot say which one is better and should be developed more because each of them has its own value. If the artist can stay up all night to finish his paintings then the graphic designer gets the same thing with tons of unnamed stuffs. There is really a relationship, why they cannot be judged equally? And when we can make them to become equal? That turns back to social figures, doesn’t it?

John Carey, the English academic has a book that said about the absolute measure in artistic worth. He mentioned about visual art and stated that there is no defining yardstick for this. Anything we choose to call art, is art. It’s all about the matter of personal choice. Once again, we meet at the point about personality. So it’s like a circle, no start, no end but I think it should be like that. Like us, I like orange but you like blue, what makes us different from each other is in fact the element made the world vary and develop. There should be “difference” to lead us to discover the new.

Sources:
Graphic Design vs. Illustration