The ransom note school of design
Oct. 5th, 2008 06:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purpleponyartI rarely put on my snob hat, but one thing I can't stand is the ransom art school of design. I was reminded of how much it bugs me when I finally got to sit down and read Artful Cards edited by Katherine Duncan Aimone. I picked it up on my way out of the library and a quick flip revealed some neat ideas, but most of the examples are really unartistic.
I can understand how people can be overwhelmed by a limitless choices of textures, colours and materials and fonts, but if these elements are not chosen correctly with regard to composition, size, texture and colour, it just ends up like someone spent an afternoon ripping up paper, stitching paper and punching paper in random, chaotic ways. Ugly, distracting and unappealing sounds harsh, but that's exactly what most of the designs are. The contributor biographies show people who clearly have immense talent, but they just couldn't bring it to this book. I think they aimed too low and wanted to make card making so accessible to everyone (because everyone can rip paper and glue it down after all) that they missed out teaching some pretty basic art fundamentals rather than just assembly techniques that would have made this a more valuable book to beginner cardmakers.
I can understand how people can be overwhelmed by a limitless choices of textures, colours and materials and fonts, but if these elements are not chosen correctly with regard to composition, size, texture and colour, it just ends up like someone spent an afternoon ripping up paper, stitching paper and punching paper in random, chaotic ways. Ugly, distracting and unappealing sounds harsh, but that's exactly what most of the designs are. The contributor biographies show people who clearly have immense talent, but they just couldn't bring it to this book. I think they aimed too low and wanted to make card making so accessible to everyone (because everyone can rip paper and glue it down after all) that they missed out teaching some pretty basic art fundamentals rather than just assembly techniques that would have made this a more valuable book to beginner cardmakers.
