Our minds on media.

Musings on the effects of media on cognition.

Information and Art

If information can be reduced to the concept of what reduces the number of choices you have to make, then what does art, if it is examined as the opposite, accomplish? Emotion and information aren’t the same thing and are often at odds. Somewhere along the way in your design career, you realize that what you are doing isn’t exactly art. Sometimes it seems to border on art and then sometimes it just seems very commercial. Sometimes art seems commercial itself. Graphic design is really always about solving a communication problem. There’s a message and someone needs to get it — so no matter the importance of the aesthetics of the piece, the message must be clear. So one way to look at art is that it need not convey… anything. It can convery something, but more often than not it is meant to convey a feeling, not a message. Art with a message isn’t really art, it’s propaganda.

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