Exactly what is the heart and soul of graphic web design? Is it the combination of technology and art? Is it the pursue of keeping some beauty in a world that is being transformed into the digital age? What is the one part of graphic web design that with out, graphic web design wouldn’t even exist? That question had me asking friends and family what they thought was the soul of graphic web design. My conclusion? Innovation. Not art, not technology, not design, not marketing, but innovation.

Graphic web design could not be in existence with out innovation. Because innovation’s definition is to introduce something new or to make changes in anything established. Graphic web design is changing what medias are used in graphic design. It has come from the multimedia of newspapers to magazines and now to the web. The innovation of the graphic designers, computer programmers, and software developers has taken what used to be only seen by people on billboards or on posters to the screen of a computer so that anyone, anywhere, doing anything can see that work and be so much the better for it because of it’s beauty and how it changes their perspective of the world.

Without those designers, programmers, and developers the use of computers would be used only by those in communications and in the expansion of technology. The Internet and software would not be used as it is used today if graphic web design had not come into play. Those innovators changed the appearance of the web and everything on it, creating a completely new field. A field that is one of the largest entertainments of th world. A field that one day would have many young men and women studying to enter into that field specifically.

Not all artists see technology as a creative media. Photographer Tim Flach stated in the online magazine Adobe Magazine for Creative Professionals “Technology for it’s own sake is an empty vessel.” That can be seen as, if you don’t take art and beauty and combine it with technology, something great will never be achieved. Or it could be seen that in Flach’s personal opinion, technology isn’t an art form, but a branch of the scientific world.

But innovation isn’t just the evolution of fields already in existence. And while some may see that is how graphic web design came to be, I don’t entirely agree. Graphic web design evolved from the graphic design that has been in newspapers, and on billboards and posters across the world. But I also see that graphic web design came from the combining of different fields, even some which were at one time see as utterly unrelated. The innovation of those who saw to bring together art, technology, and programming into one field is what I see as the origins of graphic web design.

Sources: Adobe Magazine for Creative Professionals Tim Flach