Some Thoughts on the ‘Problem’ of Flat Vector Graphics
Whilst many practitioners celebrate the rise of hand-drawn illustration in the face of a computer-based approach to visual communication, I think it’s time to reassess the terms of the debate and assert, amongst other things, that digital techniques have brought about the re-emergence of the spatial plane as a basic structuring element of design. This is not to say that it ever went away, rather exponents of a hand-drawn (some say ‘self-expressive’) practice simply lost sight of its centrality to the constitution of their own formal concerns.
The improvised, calligraphic line has enjoyed much currency of late and has led to the marginalization of other significant developments in the area of graphic practice. For when the ‘flat vector graphic’ approach is cited as the antithesis of expressive form, this underplays the contribution of designers and illustrators coming to terms with digital communication; in particular, their exploration of alternative hierarchies within familiar organisational structures in Design. Within the flatness of computer-based work there is the arrangement of compositional space across a two-dimensional plane to consider; that is, the thoughtful composition of visual elements in relation to its founding surface. The ground upon which other elements of design are situated (the point and line designated in Modernist primers) is, itself, undergoing a process of fragmentation. The ‘flat vector graphic’ approach cuts into the framed space of the empty page or blank computer screen and reconfigures it as interlocking shapes and, in some cases, a multiplicity of receding surfaces.
This dissolution of the designer’s ‘ground’ into a series of inter-related fragments has been accompanied by another significant emergence in graphic practice: the rise of colour. In the work of Shynola and Joe Magee, for instance, the CMYK colour palette is deployed in a way that exceeds the limited range of a corporate identity swatch, for example. Their experiments with shape across the two-dimensional plane have allowed depth to be added to the graphic image through the device of tone and contrast. This depth of surfaces (or recession of discrete flat planes), it seems, stands in stark contradiction to the ‘flatness’ invoked by popular mythology. Perhaps the designer or illustrator might have sacrificed a fluid sense of line (a contentious assumption), sometimes opting for an even-weighted point drawn continuously across the ground, but this is not to suggest that the image is lacking in life or personality. One simply needs to search for the designer’s intervention elsewhere. The designer’s hand is at work in the deployment of interlocking and overlapping planes.
As Kandinsky has explained in Point and Line to Plane in relation to the impact of Photography (a ‘new’ technique) on painting:
“His eyes (the practitioner) have become sensitized to realize the rhythmic life in the span of the inbetween . . . its endless combinations of colours, forms and contrasts, in their relations to each other or to space” (Kandinsky 1947: p.11).
Julia Moszkowicz, Senior Lecturer Bath Spa University
Although I can understand the reasoning of the above – it seems to be telling a half truth by providing a very deliberate ‘cut out’ of picture theory, which excludes much in its attempt to provide a quite formalist interpretation of illustration/digital media. One issue is Perspective; perspective originally enters the visual realm to facilitate a way for the artist to understand (in a scientific sense) and represent reality – much has been written on the cultural power of such an affiliation – perspective provided a reproducible rule book to allow artists to capture the ‘real’. This traditional form of representation has been a foil for the avant-garde in subverting reality – which has included ‘inter-related’ fragmentation but this position, ideological or artistic, I would argue is missing in the work referenced here. I think many of these forms of illustration provide a safe distance from any real subversion – the Shynola example reminds me of the South Park animations – any sophistication of ‘interlocking and overlapping planes’ is lost in the banality of the stereotype.
/Christian 27/09/2005