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Up until the late 20th century, the graphic-design area had been based on handicraft processes: layouts that were drawn by hand so as to create a design; type was specified and ordered from a typesetter; and type proofs and photostats of images were assembled into position on heavy paper or card for photographic copying and platemaking. Over the course of the 1980s and early ’90s, however, rapid changes in digital computer hardware and software completely altered graphic design.
Software for Apple’s 1984 Macintosh pc, such as the MacPaint program developed by computer programmer Bill Atkinson and graphic designer Susan Kare, had a revolutionary human interface. Tool icons controlled by a mouse or graphics tablet allowed designers and artists to use computer graphics in an intuitive way. The Postscript™ page-description language from Adobe Systems, Inc., allowed for pages of type and images to be assembled into graphic designs on screen. By the mid-1990s, the development of graphic design from drafting-table action to an on-screen computer action was fundamentally complete.
Personal computers allowed typesetting tools to be placed into the hands of individual designers, and so a time of experimentation began in the design of new and unusual type-faces and page layouts. Type and images were layered, fragmented, and disfigured; type columns were overlapped and run at very long or short line lengths, and the sizes, weights, and fonts were often changed within single headlines, columns, and words. Much of this research happened in design education at art schools and universities. American designer David Carson, art director of Beach Culture magazine in 1989-91, Surfer in 1991-92, and Ray Gun magazine in 1992-96, captured the imagination of a youthful audience by taking this kind of experimental approach into publication design.
Rapid growth in onscreen software also enabled designers to make elements transparent; to stretch, scale, and bend elements; to layer type and graphics in space; and to blend imagery into complex montages. For example, in a United States postage stamp from 1998, designers Ethel Kessler and Greg Berger digitally montaged John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Frederick Law Olmsted with a photograph of New York’s Central Park, a site plan, and botanical art to commemorate the landscape architect. Interwoven, these images show a rich expression of Olmsted’s life and work.
The digital change in graphic design was followed quickly by public access to the internet. A whole new area of graphic design activity bloomed in the mid-1990s when internet commerce became a growing sector of the global economy, causing organisations and businesses to quickly establish Web sites. Designing a web-site involves layout of screens of information rather than of physical pages, but approaches to the use of type, images, and colour are similar to those used for print. Web design, however, requires a host of new things to consider, including designing for navigation around the website and for using hypertext links to be taken to additional information. An example of strong web design is the Herman Miller for the Home Web site, designed by BBK Studio in 1998. These designers created a purposeful visual identity, effective navigation, and informational clarity. Attributes that added to the effectiveness of this Web site included a consistent colour palette, an informative use of pictures of products, and a scrolling montage of products.
Because of the world-wide attraction and reach of the Internet, the graphic-design sector is becoming increasingly global in scope. In addition, the merging of motion graphics, animation, video feeds, and music into Web-site design has brought about the merging of traditional print and broadcast media. As kinetic media expands from motion pictures and basic television to scores of cable-television channels, video games, and animated Web sites, motion graphics are becoming an increasingly important area of graphic design.
In the 21st century, graphic design is widespread; it is a major component of the complex print and electronic information systems. It permeates modern society, bringing information, product identification, entertainment, and persuasive messages. The unstoppable advance of technology has changed dramatically the way graphic design is created and distributed to a mass audience. However, the fundamental role of the graphic designer, giving expressive form and clarity of content to communicate messages, remains the same.
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Sculpture is an artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are shaped into three-D works. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments ranging from tableaux to contexts surrounding the spectator. An unlimited variety of materials are often used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials may be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or purely shaped and combined.
Sculpture is not a fixed branding that is applicable to a permanently restricted category of objects or sets of activities. It is, rather, the name given to art that is growing and changes and is continually extending the range of forms and evolving new styles of objects. The definition of the term was much wider in the later part of the 20th century than as it had been only two or three decades before, and in the fluid state of art at the beginning of the 21st century, one cannot predict what its future possibilities are likely to see.
There are a few features which in previous centuries were thought to be essential to the art of sculpture but are now not present in a great deal of modern sculpture and thus no longer form part of a definition. One of the most important of these is representation. Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was considered to be a representational art; one that imitated forms in life, most often of human figures but also inanimate objects, including game, utensils, and books. Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, sculpture also included nonrepresentational forms. It has long been accepted that the forms of such functional three-D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings could be expressive and beautiful without being representational. It was only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3D artworks began to be common practice.
Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was seen as fundamentally an art of solid form, or mass. Though the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows inside and between its solid areas — have always been to some degree an intricate part of its design, but that role was blatantly secondary. In a lot of modern sculpture, however, the attention has widened, and the spatial aspects have started to come out as dominant. Spatial sculpture is currently a commonly accepted branch of the art of sculpture.
It was also taken for granted in sculpture from the past that its components had to be of a constant shape and size and, with the exception of items such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), should not move. With the recent development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its elements can still be viewed as essential to defining the art.
Last, sculpture since the 20th century was no longer confined to the two traditional forming processes of carving and modeling, or to the traditional natural materials including stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Now that modern sculptors might use any materials and methods of manufacture that work for a purpose, the art can no longer be identified by any particular kind of materials or techniques.
With all this change, there is probably only one thing that has remained constant in the art form, and it emerges as the central abiding concern of sculptors: the art is a branch of the visual arts that is specially concerned with the creation of items in three dimensions.
Sculpture should be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round consists of a separate, detached piece in its own right, with an independent existence in the world as a human body or a chair. A sculpture in relief does not have this independance. It is attached to and projects from or is an innate part of an object that serves either as a background to it or a matrix from whence it emerges.
The actual 3-D nature of sculpture in the round puts restrictions on its scope in a few respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture will not cast the illusion of space from purely optical means, or invest its forms with atmosphere and light as we can see in painting. However, it does proffer a realistic experience, a vivid physical presence that cannot be found in the pictorial arts. Forms of sculpture can be tangible as well as visible, and they may appeal strongly and directly to both tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, and those who are congenitally blind, can create and appreciate different sorts of sculpture. It was, in fact, debated by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be regarded as primarily an art of touch and that the roots of sculptural forms can be found in the pleasure we experience in touching things.
All three-dimensional forms are regarded as exhibiting an expressive character along with solely geometric properties. They may strike the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and such. By exploiting the expressive qualities of form, a sculptor is able to create visual imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness mutually reinforce the form. These images go beyond the simplistic presentation of fact and evoke a huge range of subtle and powerful emotions.
The aesthetic raw material used is, so to speak, the complete realm of expressive 3-D form. A sculpture may draw upon what we see that exists in the endless range of natural and man-made form, or it can be an art of genuine invention. It has been mastered to express a deep range of human emotions and feelings from the gently tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.
All human beings, inherently involved from birth with the world of 3-D form, know something of its structural and expressive aspects and develop emotional reactions to them. This combination of intellectual understanding and sensitive reaction, known as a sense of form, is able to be cultivated and refined. It is to this sense of form that this art primarily appeals.
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