As a painter and graphic designer, it’s often that I feel the need to mix my fine art talents with my digital skills. It’s one of those things that when combined appropriately, can create a masterpiece of design. My tendency as a painter is to use wide color palettes and heavy brush strokes to express emotion and feeling within a particular piece of work, but with design it’s opposite for me. I’m attracted to clean, modern line work and softer color palettes.
This particular documentary video, “Up There”, really caught my attention. It deals with the dying art of hand-painted advertisements and the immense amount of talent, skill and work ethic it takes to create building size masterpieces vs. the new vinyl printed banners that hardly take any time to put up. It’s a reflection of the generational change in advertising, such as when typefaces were set by hand, or posters and advertisements were done via cut and paste and pen and pencil. As a young designer, I think it’s important to look back at the older ways of doing things. Everything is so digitized now that it’s easy to forget how hard design was before the introduction of all the great production tools we have today.
