Infographic Art
[toc style="float: right; width:225px; margin: 17px 0 0 10px;"]
The aim of Infographic Art
Infographic Art was revealed to me in my efforts to direct my art at purposefulness and through the difficulty of conveying intricate and complex and/or abstract and broad concepts of spirituality. The deployment of icons and archetypical visuals in my artworks was the first step towards Infographic Art.
Now, although the use of archetypes was not invented by me of course and is known since the old days of the Christian religious art and Renaissance art, the use of typical and characteristic graphic signs that usually belong to the graphic design area, are definitely innovative.
The combination between the conceptual and expressive freedom of art and the confined and consolidated creative order of graphic design was inspired gradually during my work in the infographics department of the newspaper I used to work in as a graphic designer.
Essentially, Infographic Art relies on the principles and language codes depicted in The Manifest for Applied Abstract Art, but also makes use of icons and archetypical symbols in order to convey intricate messages in abstract. Infographic Art is a special variant, a species of Applied Abstract Art, rather than a visual language of its own.
What is infographics?
The concept » Infographics is a specific field of expertise aimed at conveying quantitive, comparative, factual and generally all non-abstract types of information in a visual manner. In newspapers and magazines infogrpahics is directed at turning dull and boring information into something that is more visually tempting, in order to allure readers into the particular content.
Emphasis » Infographics put the emphasis on the following: weights in composition, weights in colorfulness, associations of colors and shapes (green is “good”, red is “bad”, square is “harsh”, round is “soft”, etc.), and a strong emphasis on typographical hierarchies. All these must serve the content. Naturally, the info is the most important element in infographics and the design must adapt itself to what the editor feels is important to deliver to the readers. Of course, a dialogue between the designer and the editor is always welcome…
The differences between Infographic Art and infographics
The major differences between infographics and Infographic Art are in principal the derivatives of differences between art and graphic design, and they are as follows:
Immediacy
An infographic item in a newspaper that needs to be contemplated upon for an hour in order to be understood is bad infographics. Just the same as one would not expect an article in a newspaper to be so comprehensive and complex as to require hours of reading, re-reading and analyzing – there are books for that, so also infographics must be immediately interpreted and the info itself promptly propagated and clearly understood, and at most with the aids of plain and simple indexes of icons, forms or colors. Deeper concepts require an art piece, and in our case, an Infographic Art piece.
Depth of content
The need for immediacy of understanding forces infographics to deal with shallow functional purposes only. But since that’s its purpose in the first place that is no problem. Deeper, more complex or more abstract issues can not be engaged via infographics. Infographics can handle at most the shallowest informational facets of day-to-day life, while as Infographic Art can cover the entire spectrum of life – mind and matter – depending on the depth of the mind of the creator.
Aesthetics and Restrictions
In general, when it comes to creation there needs to be order, harmony and hierarchy in terms of appearance and aesthetics in order to allow the observer/listener greater ease and pleasure in consuming the information. Not everything has to be Pop, but chaos evokes unpleasant sensations in most of us. For that reason, every newspaper, magazine or other form of media defines a language of expression. In the case of newspapers this language is consolidated into a fixed palette of colors, formative definitions of expression, typographical character and hierarchies, as well as fixed sizes for compound graphic elements (most newspapers work within the definitions of “columns”). These rules apply to all graphic elements used in the process of creating a compound infographic element for use in the newspaper.
Graphic design is not art – it is aimed at marketing and conveying fast and immediate ideas and propagating the existing in a more harmonious and aesthetic manner rather than creating per se. Even positioning and branding companies, for example is aimed only at delivering a fast and immediate feelings/notions of “the field and vision” of the company. There fore, graphic design works within limitations. This is not to say that graphic design is necessarily flat-minded and dumb – there are graphic designs that in my mind are no less than masterpieces of thoughtfulness, sensitivity, awareness and creativity. Also, the above does not mean that art on the other hand, can allow itself total bewilderment and chaos – no. Art too has to form some sort of language in order to depict and convey ideas if it is aimed at allowing people to understand these ideas. However, in general art allows much greater freedom of creativity than graphic design does, and especially in newspapers, where things are usually very strict and confined.
Infographic Art allows for more freedom of aesthetics even though it also must be bound into formative and color scheme definitions in order to construct a language that can be eventually interpreted without the use of words. One reason is that Infographic Art is not printed on cheap wood-free paper used in most daily newspapers but is aimed more towards the finer materials available for print making. But that is a minor reason. The main reason is that the language principles of Infographic Art are defined based on the assumption that the observer has the time and inclination to contemplate upon the object. That allows Infographic Art to be more detailed by nature and incorporate more complex principles of language.
Concluding Infographic Art
The way I see it, graphic design in general and infographics in particular demand immediate solutions to plain problems and force you to find creativity within pre-defined borders of language and restrictions of perception, while as Infographic Art embraces wider spectrum of content and starts from scratch. Your canvas is infinity and you find the borders as you go along. If you are self-restrained, self-aware, thorough, deep, thoughtful and contemplative, than these borders will become an actual whole new
language in the world of art. Or on the other hand you can just be a technocrat artist or an Andy Warhol or something…
