From 2D to 3D

中文→從二維到三維

Prologue: This article is written for those who are not profession in design or art, but they are interested to learn more about design, as well as to gain more knowledge about art appreciation. If you are an expert in these fields, you can skip this article, or if you would like to join me, discuss about it, or have additional comments, you are very welcome!

Feature text: This is quite a fundamental topic. I believe that most people have experienced something that I am going to express here, but just did not pay attention on how it worked and its rules. This also recalls what I have mentioned yesterday in the “Preface” about–graphic design is focusing and researching on those visual elements which an ordinary people will not aware its existence.

In the Western art history, we can see those pre-historical drawings in caves, or the old Egyptian paintings and ancient Greek vase drawings recorded in the early human history. These are all two-dimensional graphic arts. Until some unknown (please pardon me that this will need to dig into a deeper research), light and shadow started to appear on paintings. In the ancient Roman paintings, we can see the light and shadow technique has been developed. During the Renaissance time, from the popular Leonardo da Vinci’s works are painted with multi-points perspective, accurate proportion on human, scenes, and objects, as well as depicting the light and shadow. Those techniques have made the art works look alive, and pushed the realistic paintings to an ever-had historical peak.

The above is a simple description on the three-dimensional composition for art. To apply these rules on graphic design, I think that we can apply the same logic on the page layout design and arrangement of objects. Add light and shadow effect, and overlap objects with appropriate proportion to create a visual depth-of-field vision. From 2D to 3D, it exceeds the two-dimensional boundaries for graphic design by adding an untouchable depth of the third dimension!¶