Jon Maeda: A visonary in experimental graphic design

John Maeda is among the foremost experimental and conceptual graphic designers in the world today. He is both an artist and a philosopher whose work has influenced much of the commercial design seen today, and he is quickly falling into the status of a digital media icon. The key aspect that seems to set John Maeda apart from other designers is the fact that he fuses the art of computer programming and digital media techniques to forge the compositions which he is so well known for. (Art and Culture 2). Even before the advent of Flash and the popularity of motion graphics that are so prevalent on the Internet today, John Maeda was experimenting with these ideas, creating them in a more primal manner. Maeda describes himself as both a researcher and a designer. He has created everything from digital, interactive calendars to magazine covers and websites. For every graphic piece that he creates, Maeda writes a special program to execute it, then dispenses of the program because it has fulfilled the task that it was made to accomplish. Many of his digital compositions concentrate on the idea of user-controlled elements and the importance of the viewer’s participation. In these compos

The World Wide Web is something that Maeda has discussed as being paramount in the proliferation of digitally based artwork. Before the invention of the Internet, digital images were limited to the mediums of slides, video or print in order to be transmitted. When it first graced the market, the cd-rom was hailed as the only digital medium that could deliver mass quantities of information to people everywhere. (“Art and Culture” 7). This new medium was indeed compact and very inexpensive to reproduce, but held many limitations such as real-time transmissions. When the World Wide Web came into existence, suddenly adequate transmissions of digital information was as easy as mailing a letter. This changed everything all at once. In addition to affecting society within all facets in a profound manner, it gave validity and solidarity to the digital arts. Up until this point, artwork created on the computer was not seen as paramount or as necessary as printed material. Hypertext Markup Language became an official channel for digital art within the commercial art community and put a stamp on the doubts of the Internet’s capabilities. With the arrival of a new medium, came new issues in design that had to be dealt with. The static image tactics of design were now only half useful in the creation of the dynamic digital images that we see so prominently on the Internet today. A new problem to arise was an added extension of functionality. A web designer not only has to worry about creating the pages, the site must function properly for an extended period of time thereafter. This is quite unlike printed images that are put onto paper and finalized in the publishing process. There never really seems to be a “standard” for very long in web design, as version numbers are going up by the tens within a month of given software’s inception. This does not seem to effect Maeda much, however, as he sees design from a predominantly programmatic standpoint. To him, the creation of a temporal form is really no different at its most basic level, than the creation of a static form; it is all code. Maeda has used his indifference many times to benefit from the web design market and states that he usually spends no more than three hours per kinetic construction. Among many other website oriented jobs he has participated in, he was commissioned by Kaoru Matsuzaki of Sony to create unique cover pages for the now defunct Sony Drive website. (“Numbers” 22).

With the technology that is in use today, printed images are not yet able to change at high speeds. However, digitally displayed imagery still cannot be truly realized at extremely high resolutions. We could theorize that in the future, digital images will become sharper and print will better utilize the property of motion. Both of these formats, regardless of their differences, share unique and intrinsic qualities that can be appreciated. Printed images, or images made for print reproduction, typically look most natural when they are printed on paper. Digital images, or images that were created to be viewed digitally, look best when they are displayed on a screen. This raises the question as to whether or not there is or can be something called a “digital print.” Because of the nature of the very essence of a digital image, one could say that a print of a digitally realized image is simply a rough or approximate representation of it. It is a projection of an approximation of what the image appears to be, in other words, it is representational of the actual image. The digital image is also in itself representational of the digital information of which it is comprised; it is not an actual tactile object. A printed digital image is then a representation of a representation. (Albrecht 54)

Because true digital forms are non-existent in the physical realm, we must train our eyes to see the invisible, to look into the electrical conscious of the computer, in order that we may to truly

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