Art and Web Design- Part I

Posted on Dec 4th 2009 | 0comments

A Revolutionary Period

Sometimes I wish I could go back to the first half of the 20th century and become a part of all those revolutionary changes which were happening in the fields of arts and science. It was during this time that Albert Einstein came up with his brilliant theories which totally revolutionized the world of Physics. The same period is also known for emergence of various art movements like Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism, which were led by some great artists like Picasso and Salvador Dali.

A Creative Burst

While the early half of the 20th century saw creativity in paintings and sculptures, the 21st century is more about creativity in web designing. Every now and then, we see some beautiful websites coming from web designers all over the globe. But the question still remains – Are we witnessing the same creative burst in web designing which we saw in art in the first half of 20th century? It’s true that there are some beautiful websites out there, but still most of them (including mine) are quite normally designed.

Recently, Smashing Magazine published a brilliant post on how to get more creative with your blog designs. We really need more such out of the box ideas to get more creative with our web designs. My search for such creative ideas coupled with my study of various art movements led to me a thought of blending art movement creativity into web designs. Let me explain this in more detail.

Four major art movements emerged in the first half of 20th century – Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism and Surrealism. All of them had distinct art styles and were led by painters like Picasso, Umberto Boccioni, El Greco and Salvador Dali. The idea is to blend these distinct art styles into web designing.

Cubism and Web Design

Let us first begin with Cubism. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Following are some examples of cubist art:

These artworks might look a bit complex at first look. However, if you look at them carefully, you will notice that several elements have been arranged creatively to present the big picture. This type of approach may be suitable for travel blogs or science & technology blogs wherein several photographs (elements) can be arranged in a creative manner to present the central theme (big picture).

SpaceCollective comes close to this idea but still it’s not cubist.

You can surely take this idea to the next level by arranging the elements more creatively to give a more cubist touch to your design. You can even just design your header and footer in cubist style if you don’t want the entire designed with this approach. However, you should take care that the final design should not look a mess. Designing with cubist style will take some practice, but I assure you that it’s worth all the hard work.

In forthcoming posts, we will take a look at Surrealism, Expressionism and Futurism and how you can integrate these art styles in your web design. Give me your views about this post in the comment section below.

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