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Up until the late 20th century, the graphic-design area was based on handicraft processes: layouts that were made by hand to actualise an idea; type was specified and ordered from a typesetter; and type proofs and photostats of images were assembled in position on heavy paper or card for photo reproduction and platemaking. Over the course of the 1980s and early ’90s, however, rapid changes in digital pc hardware and software completely changed graphic design.
Software for Apple’s 1984 Macintosh pc, such as the MacPaint program created by computer programmer Bill Atkinson and graphic designer Susan Kare, had a revolutionary human interface. Tool icons controlled by a mouse or graphics tablet enabled designers and artists to use computer graphics in a new, intuitive manner. The Postscript™ page-description language from Adobe Systems, Inc., allowed for pages of type and images to be assembled onto graphic designs on screen. By the mid-1990s, the development of design from a drafting-table action to an on-screen computer action was essentially complete.
Personal computers allowed typesetting tools to be placed into the hands of individual designers, and so a period of experimentation occurred in the creation of new and unusual type-faces and page layouts. Type and graphics 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 changed within single headlines, columns, and words. Much of this type of research took place 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, caught the imagination of a youthful audience by taking this kind of experimental approach into publication design.
Rapid advances in onscreen software also enabled designers to make elements transparent; to stretch, scale, and bend them; to layer type and graphics in mid-space; and to amalgamate 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 evoke a rich expression of Olmsted’s life and work.
The electronic change in graphic design was shortly followed by public access to the Internet. A whole new area of graphic design activity bloomed in the mid-1990s when internet business became a growing sector of the world-wide economy, causing companies and businesses to quickly establish web-sites. Designing a Web site involves layout of screens of information rather than of 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 through the website and for using hypertext links to jump 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 strong visual identity, effective navigation, and informational clarity. Attributes that added to the effectiveness of this website included a pleasing colour palette, an informative use of pictures of products, and a scrolling montage of products.
Because of the world-wide usefulness and reach of the Internet, the graphic-design trade is becoming increasingly global in scope. Moreover, the blending of motion graphics, animation, video feeds, and music into web-site design has caused 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 ubiquitous; it is the main component of the complex print and electronic information systems. It permeates contemporary society, bringing information, product identification, entertainment, and persuasive messages. The inexorable advance of technology has dramatically changed the way graphic designs are created and distributed to a mass market. However, the basic role of the graphic designer, giving expressive form and clarity of content to communicative messages, remains the same.
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Sculpture is an artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are worked into 3-D objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments ranging from tableaux to contexts around the spectator. A variety of media are often used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials will be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or simply shaped and combined.
Sculpture is not a fixed brand that applies to a permanently standing category of objects or sets of activities. It is, rather, the name of an art that grows and changes and is continually extending the range of forms and evolving new kinds of objects. The scope of the term was much wider in the latter half of the 20th century than as it had been merely two or three decades prior, and in the evolving state of the visual arts at the start of the 21st century, it is impossible to predict what its future possibilities are likely to be.
There are some features which in previous centuries were considered essential to the sculpturing art but are not present in a great deal of modern sculpture and thus no longer form part of a definition. One of the most elementary points of these is representation. Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was seen to be a representational art; one that imitated forms in life, most often of human figures but also inanimate objects, such as game, utensils, and books. At the start of the 20th century, however, sculpture also included nonrepresentational forms. It has long been accepted that the forms of such functional 3D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings could be expressive and beautiful without having to be representational. It was only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3D artworks began to be produced.
Before the 20th century, sculpture was considered primarily an art of solid form, or mass. Though the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows within and between its solid forms — have always been to some kind of degree an inextricable part of its design, but the role was purely secondary. In a lot of modern sculpture, however, the attention has shifted, and the spatial elements have come out as dominant. Spatial sculpture is today a wholly recognised area of sculpture.
It was also taken for granted in the past ideas of sculpture that its components consisted of a constant shape and size and, with the exception of pieces 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 form can still be considered essential to defining the art of sculpture.
Additionally, sculpture since the 20th century has not been confined to the two traditional forming procedures of carving and modeling, or to any traditional natural materials like stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. Now that modern sculptors may use any materials and methods of manufacture that will serve a purpose, the definition of sculpture can no longer be identified for the use of any particular materials or techniques.
Throughout all these changes, there is probably still one area that stays constant in the art of sculpture, and it exists as the central abiding concern of sculptors: the art form is a part of the visual arts that is specially concerned with the creation of works in 3-D.
Sculpture may be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round will be a separate, detached piece in its own right, leading the same kind of independent existence in the world as a human body or a chair. A relief does not possess this independant form. It is part of and projects from or is an integral part of something else that might serve either as a background to it or a matrix from which it projects.
The actual 3D nature of sculpture in the round restricts its scope in a few respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture will not have the illusion of space from simple optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as we can see in painting. But it does possess a kind of reality, a vivid physical presence that is simply denied in the pictorial arts. Different sculptures can be tangible as well as visible, and they can appeal strongly and directly to both tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, and those who are congenitally blind, can construct and appreciate certain sorts of sculpture. It was, in fact, argued by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be seen as elementarily an art of touch and that the first roots of sculptural forms can be traced to the pleasure that we experience in doing this.
All three-dimensional forms are regarded as possessing an expressive character along with purely geometric properties. They may be viewed the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so on. By exploiting the emotive qualities of form, the artist is able to create imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness mutually reinforce the form. Visual imagery will go beyond the mere presentation of fact and demand a near endless range of subtle and powerful emotions.
The aesthetic raw material in the form is, so to speak, the total realm of expressive 3-D form. A sculpture can draw upon what already exists in the endless variety of natural and man-made form, or it can be an art of genuine invention. It has been utilised to express a deep range of human emotions and feelings from the subtly tender and delicate to the terribly violent and ecstatic.
All human beings, innately involved from birth with the world of 3-D form, know something of its structural and expressive properties and will develop emotional reactions to them. This combination of intellect and sensitivity, called a sense of form, may be cultivated and refined. It is to that sense of form that sculpture primarily appeals.
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