The Era of Arts and Technology

Finally the time has come for technology and creative arts to work together collaboratively and harmoniously. My entire career I've been dreaming of the time that technology was advanced enough to gracefully support and liberate the creative artists' ability to express themselves digitally.

I remember the early days when Windows first hit the market. Big step up from the basic DOS and mainframe terminals, but it was PAINFUL. Sure we had the windows and the menu bars and this great big space in the window to work with, but it was made for simple forms and basic boxes with labels. I however was working with full image data files (TIFF I believe), trying to get them to display properly IN the window space, and then map the coordinates on the screen to actual coordinates on a physical document that corresponded to the image. It wasn't meant to be easy back then.

Mind you, that was nothing compared to the university days. When I did computer graphics at UW, we had to BUILD the graphics kernal system FIRST and then for the final project, we had to make an image using the graphic system. Shortly after I graduated, the next generation of students got to take the short cut and use IRIS work stations to just create!

Although we've come a long long way, the tools still aren't the easiest. It's a little difficult to learn how to use Adobe Creative Suite and it takes a lot of practice to be able to make the application work its magic. Although it would be interesting to see what it would be like to start from scratch and create a new paradigm for the graphic design interface, I don't think you'd want to step back and reinvent the wheel and lose all the progress.

I don't think people appreciate the hard work and research that lies underneath the gorgeously rendered graphics and animations that they have today. Now that we have technology to deliver services to people, those services need to be made aesthetically gorgeous to make the grade in marketing.

And so the time has come for The Arts and Technology era to rise up and shine. Merging complex technology with visually delicious graphic design creates amazing experiences for humans. It's been a long path and I tip my hat to all the geniuses who contributed to creating the tools we have today to make gorgeous user experiences. Now, it's time to create!