kartooner

John Martz of robotjohnny.com posted an intrigu­ing arti­cle the other day in regards to graphic design­ers and artists in gen­eral being replaced by soft­ware. It’s a heated debate amongst the graphic design com­mu­nity espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the major­ity of artists believe com­put­ers sim­ply could never replace an artist. It’s evi­dent that a com­puter can how­ever repli­cate the works of Picasso and Van Gogh but only based on a set of instruc­tions (or algo­rithms) that tell the com­puter to repro­duce the artwork.

My com­ment in response to his arti­cle summed up my thoughts;

“As a graphic designer and car­toon­ist I am wary of these “solu­tions”. First of all, a com­puter sim­ply can­not replace a designer or artist for that matter.

When I vis­ited the Getty Museum in Los Ange­les, CA the paint­ings show­cased there by artists like Picasso and Van Gogh exuded human cre­ation. I sim­ply can­not see a com­puter being able to recre­ate (or repro­duce) those works with­out human intervention.

Sure, a com­puter can scan in a draw­ing and ran­domly apply algo­rithms to repli­cate the look of brush­strokes, but the essense of any art piece is that of the artist himself.

Granted, I’m not against uti­liz­ing the com­puter to aide in your art but the com­puter as the sole cre­ator of mas­ter­pieces, art­work and graphic design? Never.

In a way this relates to Dis­ney fir­ing a good por­tion of their 2D artists to replace with 3D CGI. Noth­ing spells doom than a world with­out the inter­ven­tion of humans. I’m envi­sion­ing a Ter­mi­na­tor uni­verse and that’s scary.”