Tendencje w projektowaniu okładek współczesnych publikacji elektronicznych. Wybrane przykłady

Abstract

The need to connect the traditional aesthetic school (based on the philosophy of art) with a new variety of the electronic-media sphere is an issue new media theorists have been working on for many years. The new area, described among others as: communication, digital, electronic, or new-media aesthetics, due to the diversity (formal and technical) of the graphical material, which it studies – it cannot be described using the traditional methodology, it also cannot be limited to the same aesthetic framework. Different contexts can be used to characterize virtual exhibitions, photography, videos or electronic publications (decoded using fractal compression, rather than the traditional/linear one). With the arrival of the electronic media art, a “qualitative” shift of the presented material takes place. According to common assumption, the differentiating factor of a piece of art becomes its “generability” rather than “reproducibility”. As Krystyna Wilkoszewska points out, the new media aesthetics can draw from ages-long traditions, or it can (considering the fact that electronic media radically change - in terms of ontology and epistemology – the basic elements of the aesthetic situation) try to build a digital aesthetics from ground up as an aesthetics of a new kind of culture and art29. According to the authors of this article, the tool for studying new digital material can be found in inter alia the rules (the so called “eight laws of artistic experience” by Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran and William Hirstein30) successfully used in visuality research. The article includes an analysis of the graphic layout od selected electronic book covers. It will mainly comprise digital born works (not related to any traditional/printed equivalents). Attention is also paid to the visual aspect of this group of objects. The considerations focus on which tendencies in graphic design of modern e-books can be observed today.