Pet peeves from the world of postscript illustration
As more and more publications spring up on the desktop, as more newspapers commit their production to the screen, there exists, more than ever, a proliferation of BAD COMPUTER ART. The reasons for this range from lack of guidance with software, to amateur artists bringing forth a wealth of sad clip art, infographics, and illustrations that put a bad rap on the world of computer illustration in general.
Some of these examples are of redundant mistakes that I've seen in local and national publications. Many point to a learning curve on behalf of the illustrators involved. Other instances occur with tight deadlines. Examples include flat drawings, incomprehensible diagrams, to ineffective scanning technique.
The first example, is one that graced the pages of a local metropolitan newspaper. In this case a christmas tree ornament. The predominant problem is the repeated use of linear, flat, shading applied to a painfully obvious spherical object. From the ball itself, to the attachments, all of them have been hastily filled with linear vignettes, or blends. Some of this may be attributed to the ease which one can fill objects with blends in Aldus Freehand, or Virtuoso (for you NeXT users out there). While this can shave time off shading an object, they signal a red flag of someone who is unaware of 3 dimensional illustration. Adobe Illustrator users are often guilty of this as well. Adobe illustrator artists may be less prone to this sin, as they are spared the luxury of "filling" and object with a blend rather than getting down the nitty gritty and applying a dimensionally masked "created" blend.
If one creates the blend, taking into consideration the shape of the highlight's beginning and end, then one can often create an effective map of the 3-dimensional surface. Sounds obvious, but I've seen this many times from UPI, Newsweek, USA Today and other journals that are permitting hasty illustrations to grace their pages. Look for it and tell me how often you see it.
Infographics are also becoming ugly. In an effort to make them scream at the viewer, the artist in question will often times detail a graph, or graphic it to death. Worse are those that are so special effect laden, that the message of the item becomes incomprehensible. This is especially true of 3-d Charts. The most overused effect to type and graphs is the drop shadow. In some cases I've seen drop shadows fight the chart to the point of confusing the shadow with the bar of information. Other problems occur with backgrounds, unreadable type elements, and stacked items that betray the information provided.
The most annoying, and most prevalent item I've seen occur, is the presence of "bitmapped" line art. This art, frequently found in advertisements in newspapers, looks like it's gone out the wrong end of a fax machine. In fact, I don't doubt that people have gone to print with fax transmissions in some cases. More often it's the work of production people, gang scanning material for submission at low resolution, that makes line art and illustrations look like some remnant of a Nintendo Video Game. This can be avoided by scanning at a higher resolution. Simple right? Look at your local newspaper and tell me how often this occurs.
In some cases it's done by people who do not have computers with large enough hard disks, or by those who need to get the material on a small floppy disk. If this continues, it's only going to get harder to justify the advantages gained by electronic publishing to the purchasing department, when the artwork looks worse than what you can get out of a stat camera.
I don't propose to be the best illustrator on the desktop, far from it.
You can never stop learning shortcuts, and exploring ways to draw on the screen. Bad computer artwork however, will only cause more friction, and prevent more people from finding out just how versatile the computer can be.
Until Andy Rooney stops whining, I'll keep the nitpicks coming.
