Being a part of graphic design community and get involved with the creative mind and creations within it is enjoyable. The more creative artworks I see, the more blurry and difficult for me to differentiate one artwork to another. But when my friends and I were discussing about Frespiration! contents and artwork category, some of us disagree to include Photography category to the lists. They believe that photography is not part of graphic design, but part of cinematography, while others believe the opposite. This makes me think twice whether photography could be categorized under graphic design or not.
I read related article “art Vs. design” written by Craig A Elimeliah on AIGA Website. It explains the differences between the two of them and here’s what it defines for design:
A designer is similar to an engineer in that respect and must not only have an eye for color and style but must adhere to very intricate functional details that will meet the objectives of the project. The word “design” lends itself to a hint that someone or something has carefully created this “thing” and much planning and thought has been executed to produce the imagery or materials used for the project.
Some reasons of why it’s blurry for us to see the difference between Photography and Design, that both of them created to aesthetically please the eyes and sometimes entertains the viewers. So, why can’t photography be categorized under graphic design? Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe wrote three views of photography and whether photography is beneficial to art or whether it is art at all.
The first view is that photography is not an art because it is produced with a mechanical device and by chemical and physical phenomenon not by hand and inspiration. The second view is that photographs would be useful to art but should not be equal in creativeness to painting and drawing. The final theory is that because photography is so similar to lithography and etching then it would be beneficial to the arts as well as culture.
The functions of graphic design are to solve the problem, to help visualizing information, to attract viewers’ attention/interest, and to make it a memorable artwork. For photography, the function are to documenting, to capture the moment, expose reality condition or expressions. This function become beneficial to graphic design in order to help designers to visualize the related information on the design. I do not say that I’m proficient on both of photography and design, but we now noticed that photography is part of graphic design, but still it is not categorized under graphic design. Photography artworks that have been edited or not will always be categorized under photography, whereas photography artworks which is combined with text and to support visualizing informations will always be categorized under graphic design.
