IntuitiveDesigns

In my last blog entry I talked about how the computer world has revolutionized the designers and illustrator’s work environment and, as I announced, today I would like to make a comparison between all time analog tools and digital ones. As I said in my former post, in the digital world there are still some important limitations for the artists taught in the analog world. Especially in terms of sensibility and physical control of the tools.

Let’s start by looking at the usual tools of a painter: a set of brushes, a palette with colors, liquid to dilute and clean (water or turpentine), and a canvas. All of these tools, except for the liquid, are still indispensable in the digital world and they have been replaced by digital tools. But the question is: did they really achieve the aim of replacing the original ones and did they really get any better?

Starting with the brushes and taking for granted that a graphic artist usually works with a digital graphic tablet and a graphic pen, as I do myself, the question is if he is satisfied with the trade. To be able to get a work environment comparable with the analog world, is necessary to have a professional graphic tablet, with a pressure-sensitivity with 1,000 levels, and of course a graphic pen of the same level of quality. On the contrary, the strokes won’t have the sensibility and nuances that one would expect from a regular pen.

But even working with such quality tools there are some gaps to be filled. When an artist draws on paper with a regular pen there are numerous factors that will alter the resulting stroke. For instance, how sharp the pen is, the hardness of the pen, and especially the angle and position of the pen while drawing. It is true that some of these characteristics can be reproduced with the modern digital technology, but not in real time and in a fluid manner. Just one simple of stroke with a pen that takes one second can contain numerous nuances in the intensity and angle of the line. It is possible to achieve these nuances with modern applications, by using certain brush presets. But the limitation in the immediate response of the tool is still considerable, even when the most advanced models of digital tablets and pens have tilt sensitivity. This is probably the reason why many illustrators still prefer to start our sketches in paper and later scan them to be converted to vector drawing. I would like to make a comparison with the world of music technology, which I am quite familiar with.

The same thing happened when the first digital instruments showed up. Especially in the world of synthesizers because an important part of the expression and capability of controlling the instruments in real time was lost with the coming of digital synthesis. To be able to change a sound or certain parameters and nuances, the musician was obligated to go through a slow process of skipping numeric banks by hitting the same button. Before, with the analog instruments, it was as easy as moving a knob. Fortunately, in the 90’s the first virtual analog synthesizers were commercialized, offering the same result but offering the advantages of the digital world (saving information, stability, etc). This way, the capacity of acting in real time by using simple knobs was recovered. The difference between changing a sound in real time with a simple and progressive movement of a knob and to be able to listen to it’s effect at the same time, and changing a sound by hitting the same button 40 times to be able to listen to it is just enormous.

The same thing happens with digital graphic pens. Is not quite the same to be able to change the angle and texture of a stroke in real time, than drawing a stroke and later edit it with different brushes. It’s a big loss in expression and in the simple joy of drawing. Our work becomes poorer.

This happens also with other tools, such as brushes. You can’t compare the experience and result of using a hair brush with a digital pen with a brush preset selected. The touch and feel of moving a brush and distribute the color in the canvas is not comparable to a digital pen. On the contrary, all these centuries of learning about the use of the brush by the best painters in our history would be worthless. It is true though that in the last years Wacom has developed some nice tools as an answer to this problem, and I would like to remark the 6D Art Pen, the Airbrush and the Ink Pen. The Ink Pen is similar in construction to the classic pen but with the significant feature that this pen has the ability to write or draw with ink on paper and translate the information straight on to digital. It would be interesting that Wacom would think of a similar pen featuring the original drawing ink pen’s point, so the artists can use the expression of the different positions of the pen. I’m sure that, like me, many artists are waiting for the day that we can use digital brushes that can be used in the same manner as the digital pens.

Another big limitation from digital technology is the application of colors. For instance, an analog artist can put in one brush several colors and apply them on the canvas with control, and also mix them with just one stroke. The result of this action means richness and expression in the work. On top of it, the result can change depending on the consistency of the painting and the position. In the digital world, this is far from reality. Some applications such as Corel Painter, give you the possibility of painting strokes and fills in gradients, but it’s not quite the same.

Other programs like ArtRage let you paint in brushes that imitate the oil painting stroke and other artistic tools, but it’s not really customizable. I wonder when are we going to be able to have a tool that allows us to use different colors in the same brush and apply them in a realistic way. If you know any please give me some clue. It is true that is possible to create your own brushes and feature different colors and shapes into it, with a lot of work. But this is the same case as the synthesizers, working so hard on just one brush kills the creative flow of the artist. If for each stroke he wanted to take he have had to spend some five minutes programming a new brush, then Van Gogh would have turned into a boring programmer, instead of being one of the masters of Impressionist painting.

The problem in digital technology today is that we can get amazing results, but the creative flow is lost by trading it with investigation and custom made programming. As I said before, it turns the artists into laboratory scientist, and as a result the artist trades creativity and intuition by the mere use of effective techniques and tricks in which he has previously invested a long time.

Finally, I would like to refer to the last one of the painter’s tools: the canvas. It looks like science fiction but computers made us take a step back in psychomotor coordination by making us draw in one place while looking at another. And this is just in case you work with a tablet, because I know good designers who still draw with the mouse. I think this is a regression in painting techniques, and it is completely unnecessary. The only reason why we have all been accustomed to it is because there were no other choices. Fortunately, Wacom worked on it and offer a digital canvas called Cintiq, on which the artist can work directly. It calls my attention that Wacom decided to launch this canvas as a vertical model. I think that most of the designers and illustrators, at least from the old school, are used to drawing on draftsman slopping boards, which allow you to keep a good hand position for freehand drawing. I would suggest to Wacom to think about the possibility of launching an horizontal board canvas that lets the artist place the computer monitor in front in order to save space. Personally I think that the future of the art technology is about this, and I hope that in a few years a digital canvas is developed that, in the manner of a portable projection screen, lets the artist expand it in different sizes and paint on it without the use of the monitor. These kind of tools are possible today, but I imagine that they are not developed due to a lack of demand in the market, which is most oriented to vector design rather than art. Possibly, these tools come alive only when big animation studios such as Pixar need to use them.

Anyway, for those artists who miss the traditional analog way, I suggest them to keep painting in the old way if they can. And if they need to work digitally, my advice is to invest time in creating your own color palettes, and your own tools (Brushes, pens, pencils, etc). And the most important: don’t be afraid of experimentation. At the end of the day, this is a real advantage from the digital world: experimentation doesn’t mean any more that you may have to throw all that expensive material to the trash.

Sometimes I remember how different things used to be when I first started working in a professional design studio, 20 years ago, and I have the impression that if the illustrators and designers from those days would have had the opportunity of foresee how technology would change our work we would have thought it was all science-fiction.

In effect, in the 80’s things were pretty different from today. We used to work with translucent screens with fluorescent tubes installed below our boards in order to trace. In the summer they would get so hot that they would turn the studio into something similar to a nudist beach. As soon as the temperature would rise the clothes would drop. It had nothing to do with the heat from our modern computers, believe me. Sometimes an unexpected scream would make all the ink pots fall in the studio. It would come from someone who carelessly laid his arm upon a hot spot on the table.

On top of the board we used transparent acetate sheets with a grid. We would fix them with sticking tape to the board and use them as the modern Photoshop guides and rulers, but these ones were not movable. With the daily use of the cutter they used to end up full of rips so we had to change them every week. Very often the acrylic glass board would also end up full of rips. In fact, most of the methods and tools that of the designers were from the architect and draftsmen’s professions. We used to work with couché paper (a paper with a satin texture), which was really uncomfortable and unpleasant for pencil drawing because of it’s texture.

Once the pencil drawing was done, no vectorial work here of course, we used to re-draw it with rotring. The rotring was another draftsmen’s tool, which would make us spend more time cleaning than actually drawing. Very often the daily work was more similar to the life of a mariner that an artist, cleaning and checking out our tools constantly. Of course, when the rotring was not clean enough the ink would get dry in the inside and would provoke one of the most scary things in our job: a spot. To keep the famous Murphy’s law alive, the spots would always appear when the work was almost done. Of course, if you got a spot, sometimes you could use a cutter to scratch the surface of the paper and remove the ink. That’s the reason why we used couché paper. You could tell when somebody in the studio had one of these unpleasant accidents because of the sudden changes of humor and use of expletives. This still happens today in the computer world, when an application like Photoshop closes unexpectedly and one stupidly loses his unsaved work. Technology has changed but not the designers.

Another peculiarity from our work is that the drawings needed to be done in reverse, I mean like a mirror. This was a requirement of the technique because later the drawings were photographed to make a photolithograph. Personally, this was not a problem for me because I had been doing engraving art for a few years and this would also require drawing in reverse. Anyhow, I must recognize that more than once I was absent-minded and did the work in the right direction and was obligated to do it all over again. On such occasions, I would also have sudden changes of humor and use expletives myself.

After drawing in ink, the original work would pass to a room where a gigantic machine to photograph the photolithographs was placed. The photolithographs were first done on black film, a negative. These negatives would come back to the designer board to be retouched to remove undesired spots from dust specks and other crap. We had to cover the spots with a special painting and then send them back to get the positive, just like in a photography studio. Then we had to get the film dry with a hairdryer and once again fix it from undesired spots or defects by removing the black ink with a cutter. When all of the photolithographs were ready, we started the layout work placing every little film piece as a puzzle over the grid. We would fix the pieces with sticking tape, taking care of placing them right so they wouldn’t provoke undesired lines in the final printing.

Actually this reminds me a lot to the old editing techniques in the recording studios. Because my personal relation with the world of music and production, I had to learn these old techniques in a recording studio, sticking little pieces of audio tape together. It is amazing when you think some of the most legendary albums from the Beatles, David Bowie and Yes were produced with this technque, getting little pieces of tape stuck together one after the other. Nothing to do with Pro Tools, nothing to do with Photoshop.

An illustration of mine from 1987 featuring both gradient techniques: the airbrush in the dawning sky and tooth brush in the stars.

When the project would require several inks the work was basically the same but multiplied by the number of layers for each color. Also during the 80’s, the illustrators discovered an amazing tool: the airbrush. My generation grew up staring at those wonderful album covers by Roger Dean and Mouse & Kelly, and the vision of those perfect gradients was just unbelievable. When I was a teenager I was in an exhibition of a reputed Spanish children’s illustrator called Jose Ramon Sanchez who used this tool and I ran into him to ask him how the hell he would get such perfect gradients. At the time I didn’t know about the aircraft. I guess that instead of telling a 13 year old kid to spend some $1500 in such a expensive device, the man told me he used to paint them with a tooth brush. During the next week I ruined absolutely every tooth brush at home and my mother was wondering why the new tooth paste tasted like painting. You may imagine how primitive this technique was, rubbing the brush hair with the thumb and spitting acrylic painting like a fair bb gun. Nothing to do with the Photoshop gradients, of course. I later got to use a professional airbrush that a an artist friend of mine bought. It was an amazing time and our works were irresistibly crowded by gradient skies.

The work system is similar to the one today, just harder. You had to fix transparent film to the drawing and cut the lines with a cutter in order to remove the part you needed to airbrush, similar to the Photoshop masks. The airbrush was another instrument that required a lot of pampering and cleaning. When you wouldn’t, the acrylic painting would get dry around the inner needle of the gun and would provoke the damned spits. I remember once one of this bloody spits made me jump and I dropped the water pot with the airbrush hose. The next second absolutely all of the open painting cans in the board kept falling over one by one like domino pieces. I guess that was the day I started thinking about the consequences of each action in the universe.

For the text placement, it was nothing like today’s text editors of course. It is hard to believe that just 20 years ago we were using such primitive techniques. Letraset was all we knew about. I remember we used to go to these offices in downtown Madrid where you could by all sort of fonts. They had these huge drawers full of boxes with Letraset papers, and we used to pick them from catalogue books that we had. It was beautiful experience to look at all those collections of fonts. Letraset was a paper to transfer fonts, each transfer paper would give you a set of letters with the alphabet on the same font. I remember some letters, such as the S and A would run out too fast. When the studio was short of transfer papers we would have to make Frankenstein letters in a rush to get the work done using different letters. The transfer paper would work by rubbing the letters on the couché paper with a tool called a "burnisher". Very often the letters would break, especially the smaller ones, and we would have to fix them with rotring now and again. To remove the letters we would use the same technique of scratching the couché paper. Placing letters on paper is one of these things I definitely don’t miss from the old days and I wouldn’t trade my 30 seconds of editing text to that 30 minutes.

Before Photoshop, Illustrator and the computers, the life of the designer used to be pretty different, but maybe is not as much better as it seems. We have gained in terms of time, risk of losing work (if we keep a good backup), and possibilities of combining and experimenting with our work, especially when it’s about duplicating, combining and resizing layers. Never the less, for those who started before Photoshop and Machintosh, we miss lots of things from the old times and we wait for the time to come when the analog feeling is recovered from technology. Not for a better result, not for imitation of the analog world, but for a more pleasurable and sensitive work.

The next time I will talk about the limitations of digital technology for the analog artists.

Here are two different articles with opposing concepts about what sells or not, bad design or good design. Both have some interesting points.

The first is entitled “The Surprising Truth About Ugly Websites” by Mark Daoust. The premise of this first article is that ugly sells because people trust it more. They feel comfortable because it looks like there is one person or family behind the scenes instead of a large company. This is an interesting argument, but we wonder if the sites that it mentions as being ugly would do better or worse with a better design. The article does address the fact that functionality is something that is the most important of all in a web site and that is definitely something we agree with. A beautiful web site that’s hard to use does no good for anyone.

The second article is entitled “Hungy? Want another bullshit sandwich?” by Andy Rutledge. First of all, cheers to Andy for his bravery. We are sure that he really got grilled for this article, but his honesty is refreshing. The main premise of his article is that ugly sites are successful for being themselves, not for a good or bad design. That sites like Google and Amazon would be just as successful with bad design or not. Andy also did a re-design of Google that is worth checking out.

Both articles make good points, but we tend to agree with Andy on this. Badly designed and complicated web sites are hard to use and thus reduce sales when people get lost. It’s common sense. By doing a smart design for the web site by putting focus on important things and helping users navigate easier, you can increase your sales with certainty. In our opinion, it’s these things, not “beautiful” design that makes an effective web site although beauty certainly adds pleasure to the overall experience.

We found this article on the fadtastic site completely compelling. The author, Phil Renaud, did his own study comparing the use of different fonts on his essay papers in comparison to his scores. As a result, Georgia did far better than other fonts, assumed because it’s a serif font, but a little bit different than the typical font that everyone uses, Times New Roman. I would be interesting to see some serious studies done on this and the results, however, it does give a nice clue about how influential typography can be.

Article:
The Secret Lives of Fonts