Caitlin Keenan
History of Graphic Design
December 7, 2011
Computer Arts
Computer Art is a graphic design magazine that shares information and stories from graphic designers that can help many inspiring artists find their way through the difficulties of modern technology. During this essay I will be critiquing this magazine on it's articles, advertisements, and tutorials. Unfortunately I could not find this magazine in any bookstore in my area, but luckily enough they have a nice website that contents most of their articles, tutorials, and some of their advertisements.
Most of the articles that I found have many ideas about how to move forward in your art and become successful. Three of these articles I found, caught my eye and all of them have to do with becoming successful. The first article we'll look at is titled “Freelancing: When it all goes quit.” This article talks about how while freelancing thing can get quiet from time to time and not to panic when your not getting as much work as before. Alice Lickens a illustrator and designer from London gives helpful suggestions on how to past the time between the overload of work and the standstills. Her major suggestion is to keep the work flow steady and to work on more personal works if you need to. This article is a great help to anyone looking to become a freelance artist. The only downside is that it short, but what it lacks in length it makes up for in content and suggestions.
The next article is ironically called “The truth’s in the detail.” In this Paul Wyatt, who makes films, motion graphics, and websites, talks about photography and how detail is not the only thing that make a shot good, but also subject matter, and a well-framed shot. This article is good for anyone who needs help discovering what they really like. Paul talks about how he enjoys the old grainy pictures of the early days of photography because of the character it gives and how that is hard to replicate now with higher resolution cameras. Now with software programs it's easy to forget how much work went into the early days of photomontage and manipulation. Its good to see that some artist and people still appreciate the hard effort put into these works of art.
The final article is called “Successful print selling”, and as it's title implies, it shows the ins and outs of how to sell prints successfully. It explains different ways successful designers print their works with minimal cost. This article is nice for anyone wanting to know this, but it seems a little confusing by the lack of detail in how the prints sell and their reasoning behind each.
There are many tutorials on the website that could be very useful to anyone looking to create art on software programs. Some of the tutorials seem to be done with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop but some are done on program I don't even know. Most of the ads shown on the websites are about computers and software programs, but there were some about art colleges.
To conclude, Computer Arts is a fine magazine and should be looked at less once but any inspiring artist. It has many good ideas and helpful tutorial to help better your craft or for just a nice read. Even if some of the articles were not up to my liking they were still good and interesting.
