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Notes -
Will AI bring back beauty?
Looking at midjourney's top pieces of art I am struck by the beauty in them. They contain detail, high degrees of realism even when depicting surrealist themes. They tend to be symmetrical and often portray idealized versions of reality. AI art tends to portray archetypal depicitions of its motifs and often excludes blemmishes, dirt and grime.
Compare it with corporate memphis a primarily human generated art form that has gained significant traction in the public space in the past decade. This is the most expensive painting painted by a living woman.
Compare the buildings drawn by the AI with the best exterior of 2022 in Sweden according to architects.
AI gives people what it gets positive feedback from. It gives people what they want. People want visually stunning rather than the output of the art community.
Sort of both. I was in Trek last week and the in-store graphics had large photographs of bike trails in the PA/WC area accompanied by text describing them and very basic maps. They were obviously decorative but trying to inspire people to learn more. They also require ultra high-resolution photography in order to get the large photos, plus copyrighting for the trail descriptions, and accurate maps. And even then the decor is an interactive experience that isn't fully effective unless the customer gets close enough to read the text and look at the map. But it's impressive, and this kind of thing is pretty common at outdoors stores, as it gives them the vibe of a park visitor's center—you feel like you're already on the adventure you're (presumably) buying.
Of course, recreational equipment has it easy in this regard because the value of photos of Youghiogheny Gorge or even a guy riding a bike down a shady gravel road is immediately evident. But what if your company doesn't sell anything that could remotely be considered fun? What if you're in financial services, or insurance, or (god forbid) tech? Traditionally, you would use stock photos of people shaking hands and sitting at desks and the like, but these are boring and nobody pretends otherwise. They're also expensive. There are two kinds of graphics: Raster graphics and vector graphics. Raster graphics are what most people think of where the canvas is so many pixels by so many pixels and each pixel is a unique color and the higher the resolution the bigger the picture can be without it looking like crap. It's what's used for photographs and most video games. Vector graphics don't store the data in pixels but instructions. If I want to create a vector graphic of a red triangle then the file tells the computer to four lines of set lengths and fill it with a specified color, or even a gradient. The advantage here is twofold; the first advantage is that you can perform as many geometric transformations as you want on the image without loss of resolution. So if your rectangle needs to go on a billboard you just scale it up and the proportions hold. The second advantage is that these instructions take up a lot less data than storing individual pixels.
Vector art has always been the go-to for corporate logos and the like, but actual vector art had its heyday among designers in the '80s and early '90s. It allowed them to take advantage of computer technology at a time when storage limits and memory were low. It was also a new look, and pros paid a lot of money for graphics libraries they could use for their designs. Then computers got more powerful and, more importantly, more ubiquitous. By the mid-'90s, there were plenty of consumer-grade design programs that offered huge libraries and soon everyone was using clip art for office flyers, party invitations, greeting cards, and the like. It got the reputation as something that your aunt would use along with Comic Sans. Even consumers were tired of it; pros wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. Computers were now powerful enough that desktop publishers could use photographs at acceptable quality, and vector graphics were largely forgotten outside of pro applications where they were necessary.
But that was 20 years ago, and it's been long enough that if clip art induces any kind of reaction, it's nostalgia, but most people have either forgotten about it, were clueless, or weren't even alive for its heyday. While it went out of fashion, it never experienced any real backlash; it just went away. So by the late 2010s it was primed for a comeback. Logos had flattened out several years earlier, and maybe it was time for graphics to do so as well. Plus, the advantages of vector art didn't go away. If you want to make a store display you can blow it up to wall size without needing to start with a special camera and a huge file size. It would make your website slimmer and more portable. And with all the characters green and purple you wouldn't have to deal with people bitching about how there aren't enough minorities or thinking you're woke because there were too many minorities. If you're a boring company, using whimsical clip art is a way to make yourself stand out from the Getty Image laden masses. Or at least until everyone does it, and by everyone I mean other boring people, because the Yough Gorge will always be more compelling than some flavor of the month design trend, even if it's more expensive at the outset, and soon enough everyone associates the new style with the same boring bullshit they associated with the old style, because, let's face it, your company is boring, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I suppose I must link this video about the history of Clip Art now.
Good call. This is where I actually got a lot of my knowledge of the topic from, but I'm personally reluctant to link to a 30 minute video and expect people to watch it.
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