there is a tendency to, when we get new toys, to play with them a lot… and we want to show them to all our friends…. but we often forget that not always are the new things interesting to everyone else as they are to ourselves. This becomes the challenge of new media… how to compel people to join our camp and bring people to our designs. Yes the most state of the art tools are not always the best tools.
Often I make trips to the local hardware store… My main hobby is building things for my apartment out of wood I find around the city. Its an interesting, cheep and environmentally responsible way to furnish my apartment… Everything I need to do this is a tool that fits in a normal sized tool box… the only power tool I’ve ever really needed was a power drill… But at the hardware store there are many many more tools available which I do not feel the need to buy. However they exist… Perhaps if my needs adjusted I would need other tools but this is not the case… (well I could use a few extra clamps… but… ) This is something I can draw common to the user of the web site… the user has a need for information… they are searching the web as a library of information and they want to receive this information easily… Like books in the library there is an art to making books the same as there is an art to making websites…. This blog would not function as a 3D flash site… it would be harder to read… I have the text on this blog margined with a narrow body because I feel it makes it easy to read, because I want you to read what I have to say (to spite my very conversational writing style)…
so what is the valid place for graphic design on the internet and 3D flash? it is the places where we want a artful moment to accent this information… Graphics house the information and sometimes even accent of deepen the meaning of the information… “a picture tells a thousand words”… the nice thing about Flash and computer graphic design as opposed to printed work is we have a freedom that graphic design didn’t have before very recently in history… we can move and dance before the audience… 3D design is a visual vocabulary which people do understand… it is born from the art of sculpture and architecture and it can be very compelling… in fact… the more people are exposed to this vocabulary the better they will understand it and the more it will naturalize into the lives of the public and new media will continue to evolve organically with the people and the technology they use… We don’t need to stand still… but some times it is in fact still best to do so… it’s knowing when to act and when to pause or hold steady that makes good performance…
Papervision3D, Sandy3D and Away3D are wonderful tools on the shelf but knowing when to use them and when we should just pick up a pencil is important to being a good designer.
-Alex