I believe that the evolution of the medium requires such ease of sharing. You have to read through all the code, figure out what each part is doing, figure out how to disentangle the code you want from its surroundings without breaking dependencies, and figure out how to incorporate this foreign code into yours, which might be using different conventions, libraries, or even languages.Ī drawing tool for dynamic pictures should make sharing elements as easy as copy-and-paste. The picture is described by pages of code. With a dynamic picture today, appropriation is a nightmare. Even if you don't have the source file, you can at least cut out elements from the flattened output file or a screenshot. With a static picture, it's easy - you open up my source file (in Illustrator, say), and copy-and-paste objects into yours. Suppose you want to take some elements from my picture, and build on them in your own work. But most dynamic artists cannot realize their own creations, and this breaks my heart. A musician can compose a song, an animator can compose a short, a painter can compose a painting. But the truth is: An author can write a book. It's fashionable to rationalize this helplessness with talk of "complementary skillsets" and other such bullshit. Even at Apple, a designer aristocracy like no other, there was always a subtle undercurrent of helplessness, and the timidity and hesitation that come from not being self-reliant. Instead, they were dependent on engineers to translate their ideas into lines of text. But the designers could not produce anything that they could ship as-is. They would draw mockups in Photoshop, maybe animate them in Keynote, maybe add simple interactivity in Director or Quartz Composer. I spent a few years hanging around various UI design groups at Apple, and I met brilliant designers, and these brilliant designers could not make real things. Artist IndependenceĪ "user interface" is simply one type of dynamic picture. It can teach the reader what he actually wants to know, not merely what the artist guessed that everyone wanted to know. A dynamic picture can adapt to the specific reader and that reader's context. The static artist is stuck drawing one-off pictures for each country, instead of a single generalized picture.ĭynamic pictures needn't be one-size-fits-all either. Which country? Any country - just plug in its data. For example, we could draw a picture that explains the carbon emissions of a country. As the information changes, so does the picture. One-size-fits-all pictures, identical for every reader.ĭynamic pictures are ideal for visual explanations, because the parameters can represent information to be conveyed. One-off pictures, tediously drawn for a specific situation. And those few visual explanations are almost all static. But because our tools are so weak, we usually resort to describing when we should be depicting. I'm passionate about enabling people to understand, and visual explanations are crucial for understanding many concepts. Here are some more personal reasons why I'm so passionate about all this. The general motivations for dynamic drawing tools are laid out in Substroke and a chapter of Magic Ink. Magic Ink is my treatise on why dynamic pictures matter. But in no case does the artist create dynamic behavior by manipulating the picture itself. In some cases, the canvas is (so-called) "visual", with code in boxes instead of sentences. In many cases, the output picture is juxtaposed with the code.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |