Some of you might remember a little piece I wrote about a week ago about a little artwork favour I knocked up as a favour for an old friend and that I commented half-jokingly at the time about “no good turn going unpunished” and we all moved on with our lives with a surprising number of people in Denmark showing a little bit more interest than is usual for one of my stark little pieces.
Well, as predicted, the saga did indeed continue.
Now, right from the off I need to state quite clearly to anyone reading this, especially those who made the requests, that I really didn’t mind and I actually quite enjoyed doing it. In fact, because I really wouldn’t want to upset anyone I’m going to write that again, in bold italics, just so you know.
I really didn’t mind and I actually quite enjoyed doing it.
As an “artist”, even one with as limited a skill set as I regularly demonstrate, you are always stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand you want the images you produce to “look good” (or at least as good as they can), but on the other hand you are always very conscious of how little the “not-we” folk of the great wide non-artworking world understand the process.
Let me try to explain. Many, many years ago I used to work in the small ads game, and a lot of those adverts were very tall and very thin. If you ran a company called something like “McGillicuddy’s Metal Mice” (not – as far as I know – a real company…) you might have a logo that was made up of three chunky letter Ms, and your company name next to it in a nice chunky typeface, (and also, quite possibly, a picture of a mouse) and you would quite reasonably ask for this to appear nice and big at the top of your advert so that everyone could see your name leap off the page. So far, so good. The artist could put the 3Ms at the top, nice and big, and split the three words onto three lines and they would all appear in a nice chunky way at the top of the advert, drop the mouse picture underneath that and everyone would be happy.
Or so you would think…
Mr McGillicuddy might, however, have paid a gullible teenager to create his letterhead for him in an exquisitely fine and delicate font that beautifully topped off all the letters and bills he sent out, but which was all on one line spread across the full 210mm width of his paperwork. Why, he might well ask of the unfortunate salesperson presenting the draft artwork, does this fine, delicate and ultimately very wide artwork not appear big and bold and huge and heavy and in the same format as all his business stationery across the 55mm span of his trade advert? Trying to explain width and proportion and scale, and how if you reduce the width, you also reduce the height, and how the letters get naturally thinner the smaller they are is almost impossible to do under those circumstances.
Exit one unhappy customer.
But then this lack of understanding of visual space and shape always comes as a surprise to those to whom it is blindingly obvious. Say, for example, I created a decorative border for a business card that included a nice bit of simple celtic knotwork. Another customer might come along and say that they liked the celtic knotwork on Bob’s business card, and can they have something similar. So, you go away and spend quite some time creating some new and completely different celtic design for the border (and it is surprisingly complicated to do something that came so easily to the craftsmen of 1000 years ago on an electronically and mathematically precise screen), and you will present it to them and they will (hopefully) say that they like it. More often than not they will ask you to change the border though, because it’s the same as Bob’s, even though it isn’t. Sometimes, even if you show them and put the two distinctly different pieces next to each other, they still can’t see it, which is where it starts to get really confusing to the more artistically aware. The customer being always right can be a right so-and-so when they’re being so palpably wrong.
This can get even worse when you try to explain the subtle art of using space. How can you possibly ever get across to the “not-we” that strangely instinctive process by which you can move around various page elements until you get the sizes and shapes into a position that, ultimately, just seems “right”...? There’s no real science to it, you just know, just as easily as you can instinctively see when it seems wrong, or untidy or a bit scrappy.
So how does this all relate to the “quick flyer” I knocked up on that evening a week ago? Well, an immediate question was asked of my rectangular half A4 landscape artwork as to whether it could be used as a poster as well by stretching it. My artistic spacial awareness “spider sense” tingled and bristled and I resized the elements to an A4 portrait format. This was tweaked a little for content, as expected, and very flattering (we arty types do like a bit of flattery every now and again) reports came back that people were pleased with it and so forth. Then someone mentioned that they might want a larger version for attaching to lamp-posts and so on, which, I explained would be fine. The artwork could easily double in size because, at the resolution I’d done it, if the artwork was being viewed from a distance, the eye can play beautiful tricks and “clean up” any blurring that might occur.
Then someone mentioned a banner… then a different kind of banner. Suddenly my scrappy little scribblings, hastily knocked out for a little A4 poster were going to have to be blown up into high resolution artwork six feet high. This might very well have stretched the limits of the pixels in my original images far beyond their limits, but I sat down last night and reworked the image up to the required sizes and sent them off, hoping that everyone would be happy. Those pixels might still look a bit dodgy, and I am rather fretting about this, but there are limits to what you can do.So, apart from the hours of extra work done with my usual good grace, why am I saying that my good turn has found itself being punished? It was two things really. Firstly, the upload site I used to send the artwork mysteriously chose the very night I needed to use it to reduce its upload limits by 50%, a strange thing to do in an age when image sizes are getting larger. This left me having to resize the artwork again in the late evening, and still might turn out to make those pesky little pixels re-approximate themselves which might undo all the work I did in resizing them up and make the whole thing end up looking completely rubbish. Secondly, I had a look at the website and found my handbill flyer there in all its glory advertising the very event, and it didn’t half look scrappy against the sleek, minimalist, custom-designed photographic imagery which was advertising the other upcoming plays, and I felt like a right talentless hack again.
I know, I know. It wasn’t designed for that particular purpose and so it was bound to look a little out of place, and someone who has created an image can always see all the faults where others only see just another image, but it still made me cringe to see it there and now I feel slightly ashamed of it.
(By the way, there's a new LB Tabloid posting up today, if you fancy it...)
You are such a one.
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