The world of designing is so wide across the universe. Every digital communications firm is hiring the individuals for the post of graphic web designers. This is not a simple task to make your strong career in the creative industry. You require the several skills and proficiency in designing. A graphic web designer is the person responsible for formative the glance of a website. They design the layout, the colors, the fonts, and all the visual aspects of the site.

Most graphic web designers have an objective of making web pages that look best and meet the customer and client desires. Though you don’t necessitate being able to draw or paint to be a Web designer, you do have to to develop an artistic sense so that you can see when things are functioning and when they aren’t. Numerous of Graphic web designers come from a graphic arts background. This is a great starting point for a career growth as a Graphic web designer, but you should know that Graphic web designing is differs from the print designing.  

The work of the Graphic Web designers is to look after the visual design of the pages. The entirely appearance of the pages are totally depends upon the web designers, they have to look how a page looks than whether or not the scripting works. Graphic web designer plays the very essential role in the development of the site.

The some skills will be required for the Graphic web designer jobs are excellent visualization skills, Quick learner and Experience with Photoshop, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML and Dreamweaver, flash design and scripting (3.0) would be preferred. Today there are several digital communications firms in India who are seeking for the good skilled Graphic web designer who is fully capable in giving the best outputs. Even some firms will open the opportunities for the fresher’s in Graphic web designer jobs and giving them the chance to give a kick to their careers.

If you want to gain the more experience in the web designing world. You should also consider freelancing. Freelance graphic web designer jobs are all over the web, but it doesn’t mean that any person can do them. A good Graphic web designer should have an artistic eye and have some computer design skills. Freelance Graphic web designer jobs often need that proof and samples of earlier work be submitted for consideration. The only candidates will be hired whose work would impress them. They will be pay on a per project basis or on a per hour basis for a small number of hours.

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At age 23, the “Godfather” of album cover art, Alex Steinweiss accepted a job to design promotional materials for Columbia Records. What would happen next would revolutionize the music industry, specifically vinyl records, when he invented the illustrated album cover. A rather obvious, but brilliant, idea was to create a titillating graphic package that would, not only protect the record, but advertise the artist and the music contained therein (prior to this, records were sold in plain, undecorated wrappers).

”Records used to be relegated to the back of the stores that sold refrigerators and stoves. You’d go to the counter and ask for the title you wanted,” recalled Steinweiss. “I needed to shake up the industry, we had to do something like European poster art to draw the attention of the buyer.”

And “shake up the industry” is just what Steinweiss did. Starting in 1939 with his first covers, for a collection of Rodgers & Hart’s Musical Hits, Columbia executives saw the sales of the illustrated albums skyrocket, including one by more than eight hundred percent. Soon after that 78 rpm albums were adorned with decorated covers and displayed in store windows.

A new medium was born, album cover art became the norm and attracted established artists and inspired many new artists to enter the arena. It allowed the record company and the artist to promote a visual image and identity with the music.

So who was Alex Steinweiss? Let’s explore his life in detail. Steinweiss grew up in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach area and he attended the Abraham Lincoln High School from 1930-1934 and that is where he started his graphic designing career. In a program taught by Leon Friend, Steinweiss and his classmates were known as the “Art Squad,” designing school publications, posters and signs. When he was seventeen, Steinweiss’ work was showcased in PM Magazine. He received a scholarship to Parsons School of Art and graduated in 1937. His first job was as an assistant to Joseph Binder, a position that lasted almost three years, before receiving a call about a new position at the newly formed Columbia Records. He designed all the covers for Columbia between 1939 and 1945, a period in which he developed and honed the graphic art of album cover design. In the period between 1945 to roughly 1950, he still did cover design for Columbia, but he was not the sole designer. He also began “freelancing” and began designing covers for other record companies.

As a freelance designer with such record labels as RCA, Decca, London and Everest, Steinweiss was considered peerless. Using his own unique format of blending eye-catching illustrations, vivid color schemes and playful typography, Steinweiss created album covers for such musical greats as Louis Armstrong, Bela Bartok, Count Basie, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Kate Smith and many others.

His album covers are considered iconic and he designed them as miniature posters with a distinct personality for each cover. His signature font, the “Steinweiss Scrawl,” first appeared around 1947 and his style and album cover design is synomonous with the Golden Age of Jazz, Classical and Popular music that was dominated by RCA, Columbia, Decca, Victor and London record labels.

In the 1950′s, Steinweiss added photography to his album cover design palette. His use of strange, garnish colors, inventive lighting techniques and numerous visual puns and reference points only added to his unique style of cover design and has made him an icon in the music industry. By his own admission, Steinweiss claims to have designed more that 2,500 album covers.

His later work, from 1960 through around 1973, was working with the Decca and London record labels. It was during this period that he developed die-cut designs and collage. He retired to Sarasota, Florida around 1974 and remains semi-active, having designed at least one book cover and several CD covers as well as having designed liquor bottles, posters, pamphlets and titles for TV shows.

All of us owe a hearty thank you to Alex Steinweiss and his contributions to album cover art and music. Can you imagine no art work accompanying a vinyl record? I can’t, and it is a great thing that Alex Steinweiss couldn’t either.

Graphic designers are highly in demand with the rise in technologies like animation, designing, cartooning, visual effects and more. With its noteworthy success, the graphical sector has made a mark in the designing industry today.  This has led to an increasing strong interest of Graphic Design Programs among youngsters throughout the world. With this, we observe a growing number of universities offering Graphic design diploma or degree courses worldwide. However, the important part is to opt for the right study course at a well recognized college or institution as only a sincere college or institution will make you capable enough through constant current updates of the market technologies and ideas of the graphic world. Centennial College, Toronto, is a well-known college of Canada which offers this program.

At Centennial’s School of Communication, Media and Design, an Ontario College Advanced Diploma is provided just in two years to all those applicants who pursue this Post-secondary program under Centennial’s dedicated faculty. Centennial has a unique combination of design skills and practical experiences to set their graduates to stand apart in the competition. This will make graduates more flexible and their design solutions will be more effective.

Toronto’s Graphic Design Diploma will spark up your abilities under the Integrate knowledge of visual graphics with creative communications strategies for print publications, packaging and illustration.  Along with the development and implementation of solutions to problems encountered in all phases of the graphic design process, Centennial aims at enhancing your creativity in visual communications through the application of design theories and principles to develop effective design solutions. Here, Media experts will bring out the areas of applying typographic skills and knowledge to create effective visual communications and the usage a variety of technologies to create, capture, and manipulate design elements in producing a final product. Later on, there will be high focus to communicate effectively, credibly, and accurately with clients, supervisors, coworkers, and target audiences by using a variety of media. Even the chance of applying effective business practices and project management skills appropriate to his/ her position in the graphic design field is looked appropriately with the development of personal and professional strategies and plans to improve students’ career prospects.

Centennial has its own criteria of admission requirements for which the college expects applicants to present at minimum an Ontario Secondary School Diploma (OSSD) for diploma or certificate course at this college or equivalent, or be 19 years of age or older.  Take note that possession of minimum admission requirements does not guarantee admission to this program. Academically, a student should fulfill 12C or U or skill assessment or equivalent in English subject. Centennial also demands for non-academic and portfolio requirements to get admitted at this multidisciplinary program. Non- academically, applicants need to attain a program admission session where a portfolio work will be given to them, which will be considered along with the students’ English proficiency for their admission process. Furthermore, your portfolio presentation should consist 15 pieces of your original art and design that demonstrates your creativity of materials, media, techniques, and colors along with your innovative abilities and interest towards the work. Present the digital illustrations and image applications with short research paper on design philosophy and interesting graphic fields. Try to present mounted or framed work with numbered pieces in your portfolio.

Formally, Centennial College is recognized by the Association of Registered Graphic Designers of Ontario (RGD Ontario), which represents more than 3,000 graphic designers, managers, educators and students across Ontario. Thus, Centennial College would be the right choice for acquiring in-depth graphical knowledge and innovative technical capabilities for a bright and stable future.

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Of course, choosing goggles for ski is not an easy thing. You have to consider many things before you buy it. You can consider about the features of Snowboard Goggles you want. Features are very important thing because it is will be useful when you ski. After you find the goggles that has features you want, you can choose the frame of goggles. There are many choices of goggles for ski that available in various style and model. To choose these goggles, it depends on your desire to wear these ski accessories because each people have their own desire about the frame and model of goggles. Goggles are very useful when you ski. It will protect your eyes from snow, and you can see comfortably when ski. Without this accessory, sure you will not fun to ski even it will endanger yourself.

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Graphic designers take computer programs and combine them with their artistic skills to develop images that are then taken by clients to convey certain concepts to different groups of people. Graphic designers are very creative individuals who use their talents to manipulate computer software in order to create images for different clients and groups of people. Technology is very important to graphic designers as they do their work.

The majority of today’s graphic designers use desktop publishing software to engineer imagery and text. Graphic designers will generally spend many hours sitting in front of a computer monitor. There are still a lot of graphic designers who coalesce freehand drawing, computer-based plans and board work.

Since there are so many people who use the Internet to find information, graphic designers who can use online systems have been in high demand. An effective Web site is created when graphic artists work together with content specialists in order to create a complete look and experience. Designers will also construct graphic layouts for materials which are printed, like newsletters, newspapers and magazines, among other things.

Many companies use different types of printed material and it was a graphic designer that came up with these marketing products. Such publications might be brochures, ads, promotional posters, and marketing signs. Many particularly artistically skilled graphic designers utilize their illustration talents through drawing drawings and logos. There are also jobs available for graphic design artists to create animations for things like TV shows, video games, or online sites. Through the recent advances and interest in CD-ROM technology, graphic designers that can manipulate images and text to create interactive, high-quality content are also in demand.

There are several different places you will find graphic designers. Several organizations will hire graphic designers in their art department in order to develop materials and designs that will show people the goals of the organization. Other designers will find employment by working with design firms that provide services for a wide variety of businesses. Many graphic designers choose to freelance, and thus be self-employed. They select their own clients. Sometimes they work on a single project with a client or they develop a relationship over time and maintain an account, working on different pieces as the need arises.

There is expected to be a massive demand for graphic designers over the course of the coming decade. New genres of visual mediums are always developing. From #d animation to new ways to use the internet, technically skilled designers are necessary to communicate what a company wants to say to their audience. The majority of graphic designers’ jobs necessitate a minimal amount of post-secondary experience with either design or the arts. A lot of technical programs and community colleges provide associate degrees or certification in graphic art or design. There are even some schools that offer specialized, high-tech training for artists who want to work in graphic design.

There are firms who would rather employ graphic artists who have graduated from a 4-year fine arts program. People who hope to progress to management jobs might think about accomplishing class work that earns them an arts administration degree. If you are working toward a degree you should ensure that you complete extensive computer aided design and desktop publishing training in addition to the regular studio art and design courses.

A great way to get some experience is to do some internships. A lot of companies and corporations will provide students with either unpaid or paid internships. You can use the internship as a way to develop a professional portfolio that contains your best work so you have something to show potential employers. There are quite a few financial aid programs, such as loans, grants, and scholarships, to help students pay for their education. As a rule, all seniors in high school have to send in a Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which can be picked up from post-secondary financial aid offices and high school guidance offices.

The need for talented graphic designers is on the upswing, and it is expected that their pay rate will also increase above those of other jobs. The dress code for graphic designers depends upon the specific company you’re working for. There are some corporate establishments that require their employees to attend in uniform, then there are others who have created a rather casual work setting.

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DOES BLAKE’S ILLUSTRATED DESIGNS VISUALISE HIS POEMS IN THE SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE?

                                                                        Leila Rouhi Shalmaei

Master of Art in English Literature

Sussex University of England

DOES BLAKE’S ILLUSTRATED DESIGNS VISUALISE HIS POEMS IN THE SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE?

Introduction:

William Blake was born in London in 1757. His Father soon recognized his son’s artistic talents and sent him to study at a drawing school when he was ten years old. At fourteen, William asked to be apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, under whose direction he further developed his innate skills. As a young man Blake worked as an engraver, illustrator and drawing teacher, and met such artists as Henry Fuseli and John Flaxman, as well as Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose classicizing style he would later come to reject. Blake wrote poems during this time as well, and his first printed collection, an immature and rather derivative volume called Poetical Sketches, appeared in 1783. Songs of Innocence was published in 1789, followed by Songs of Experience in 1793 and a combined edition the next year bearing the title of Songs of Innocence and Experience which shows the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

 In 1809, Blake sank into depression and withdrew into obscurity; he remained alienated for the rest of his life. His contemporaries saw him as something of an eccentric- as indeed he was. Suspended between the neoclassicism of the 18th century and the early phases of Romanticism, Blake belongs to no single poetic school or age. Only in the 20th century did wide audiences begin to acknowledge his profound originality and genius.

                                                                                                                                                                      (1985, 492)
                                                                                                                                                    

 Blake’s political radicalism intensified during the years leading up to the French Revolution. He began a seven-book poem about the revolution, but it was either destroyed or never completed, and only the first book survives. He disapproved of Enlightened rationalism of institutionalized religion. In the 1790′s and after, he shifted his poetic voice from the lyric to the prophetic mode, and he wrote a series of long prophetic books, including Milton and Jerusalem.

 Blake published almost all of his works himself, by an original process in which the poems were etched by hand, along with illustrations and decorative images, onto copper plates. These plates were inked to make prints, and the prints were then colored in with paint. This expensive and labor-intensive production method resulted in a quite limited circulation of Blake’s poetry during his life. It also posed a special set of challenges to scholars of Blake’s work, which has interested both literary critics and art historians. Studies on his work shows that we should consider his graphic art and his writing together; certainly he himself thought of them as inseparable.

                                                                                                                                                                      (1985, 493)

William Blake was one of the most influential English romantic artists of the 19th-century. His poems, paintings, and engravings, revealed a remarkable talent. He was an artist who mixed his poetry with painting which was really interesting.

In his age he was influenced by various social, ideological, and political movement along with Romantic Movement which made him practice his own method and to develop a new style.

 Why does he decorate his pages with lines and stain them with color? He engraved illustrations for printed books and he was familiar with emblems, devices, borders, and other decorations that beautify and interpret the printed page.

 One critic admiring Blake’s poems writes:

 The Short poems of Blake are like pebbles thrown into a pool, creating ripples which move outwards indefinitely, affecting everything they touch. At their gentlest they are like tendrils caressing the world, at their most violent like bombs smashing to smithereens the false structures of existing belief and opinions[1].1

 In his critic of Innocence and Experience, C.M. Bowra claims that the address to Earth is an authentic appeal reflecting Blake’s desire of creating an “ultimate synthesis in which innocence might be wedded to experience and goodness to knowledge” 2 2

            The poems of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Song of Experience are portrayals of the continual conflict between innocence and experience. Each poem tells different links of interweaved stories.

Also, the “break of day “stands as a symbol of the new life in which innocence and experience will be transformed, and man’s soul will attain a fuller, more active life in the creative imagination. 3 3

 Regarding the connections between Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience and some similarities Bowra adds that:

…The Bard in the “Introduction to Songs of Experience” appears again in “The Sick Rose[1]” and is again calling to an individual; perhaps this individual is the same character as the narrator at the end of “The Ecchoing Green “. By weaving through these stories and characters, Blake portrays views of innocence and experience as they appear in several characters. While these characters may not be the actual characters in previous poems, there is enough evidence to support the theory that the characters that are introduced are meant to represent the characters that have similar experiences to those that have been introduced earlier. Blake defines a few different “type” of characters, whose types are defined by the amount, of experience, wisdom and maturity. “

Blake’s most well known work is that contained within his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience collections of poems. The former of these collections, printed 1789, depicts a naive world of nature with Christ-like overtones. It does, however, acknowledge an opposite or contrary world. The Songs of Experience, a later collection printed 1794, depicts a cold, sad despairing place.

In this essay, I attempt to compare Blake’s illustrated designs and poems in his Songs of Innocence and Experience and to examine to what extent his paintings visualize his poems.

       As my first step, I would elaborate on some of the poems of Songs of Innocence and their corresponding images. This section will be followed by a similar study on his Song of Experience. Finally, I will round up the presented arguments voiced by a number of his famous critics and then provide a conclusion.

Songs of Innocence

Blake published his Songs of Innocence in 1789. The poems of Innocence are full of life and simplicity. The texts centers on the lively period of childhood and is full of energy. Both the design and the text are simple and contain subjects which are related to nature and children. Every item in the text and especially in the design may have emblems and should be considered meaningful.

In Picture Theory, Mitchell argues in a different way about the quality of the Songs of Innocence that the hollow reed and the stained water indicate that a kind of absence and lack of innocence accompanies the very attempt to express the message of innocence. What makes the poems songs of innocence is the narrator’s unawareness of these evil connotations.  (1994,122)            

Blake himself suggested some two years before that a man might be insulted with “the innocence of a child…, because it reproaches him with the errors of acquired folly.”

 Jean H. Hagstrum says in this regard that Songs of Innocence deals with three integrally related elements – humble life, natural sexuality, and the Poet-Christ.
 Humble life is the particular province of the border which is richer and more beautiful in it than on any other of Blake’s pages. In Blake’s borders, with trees, vines, creepers, leaves, birds, and insects, life was abundant- and allusive even the letters of the title page vegetate into organic forms

 As the second major theme of Songs of Innocence, natural sexuality appears alike in word, border, and design. Some of the recurrent sexual symbols are lamb, ewe, leaves, stems, grapes, and the embrace of man and woman. For instance the boy on the second page of “The Ecchoing Green.” who gives a bunch of grapes from a vine to a girl is a symbol of sexual awareness.

The Poet-Christ of Innocence is represented predominantly in poetic and prophetic characters of divine, love, and human imagination. All those who salvage the lost are manifestations of Christ, or the divine shepherd who seeks and finds the straying sheep.

In this part I would like to explain about some of the famous poems of The Songs of Innocence such as: “The Ecchoing Green,” “The Lamb,” “The Little Black Boy” and “Infant Joy.”

I will also mention other critics’ points of view, regarding these poems.

The Ecchoing Green

Blake uses a curved line that stretches from side to side and top to side to connect different parts of form and vision. Like the designs, the poems are full of life and action; the sun, the singing birds, children playing, merry-bells, and laughter. However, the visual images lack some details that are included in the texts such as the sun and the birds. Also, the poem ends with a symbolic reference to mortality which gives the final lines a sad mood:

          “Like birds in their nest,

            Are ready for rest: And sport

            No more seen,

            On the darkening Green.”

As already stated, the second element of Innocence is uninhibited sexuality, which quite visibly is seen in “The Ecchoing Green,” in the first design of which we find a boy with a hoop and a boy with a bat which describe a summer day.

According to Hagstrum, the second page of the poem illustrates all the emblematic qualities that Blake manipulated such as: the direct appeal to children and to listening adults, the presence of proverbial wisdom as a substratum, and the conversion of people and natural details into a universal symbol. The poem is about a day of childish sport which symbolizes the beginning and end of life and is supported by its designs. On the second page, children from the right-hand side border hand grapes to members of a group who now returns home from play. It symbolizes the passage from innocence to experience through the gate of sex.                                                                          (1964,56)                                                                                                                                                      

  The Lamb

In “The Lamb,” lamb has a religious meaning and refers to Christ. The illustration in the picture shows a tree that twists all the way around the border and separates the stanzas. Also in the picture, we see a cottage which is not mentioned in the text; nor is the willow tree (a symbol of heaven) at the back of the picture. As we can see in the picture, Blake uses natural scenery to convey his thoughts. According to S. Gardner, in the visual image of the poem, the lamb is not alone; it is accompanied by a human. This shows a compound of Christian spirit and ‘pastoral reality’ that becomes a symbol of caring and is associated with the clear daylight.                          (1986, 79)

 Moreover, the word ‘stream’ does not appear in the picture. It seems that in the first stanza the child talks to an animal (a sheep), but in the second stanza he talks to Christ. In the last four lines of the poem God, Christ, and the child melt into each other and they all become one:

“He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb:

He is meek & he is mild,

 He became a little child:

I a child & thou a lamb,

We are called by his name. “

The poem has a simple style and a fluent nursery rhyme, which is comparable to the easy design of the picture. They both have a pastoral setting and tranquil scenery. In the design, there are two female angels; one of them is dancing on a wheat stem and the other is sitting on another stem under the first one and is looking at the child. Also, there are two sheep and a lamb which are surrounded by wheat stems. There is, however, no textual counterpart for the sheep and stems.

The Little Black Boy

There are two songs and two pictures for “The Little Black Boy.” In the first picture, a black child is talking to his black mother. A twisted branch separates the picture from the stanzas. There two trees facing each other that can be taken as the mother and her child in the poem. The sun in the picture is interpreted as God. The black child is sitting on her mother’s lap and points at the sun. Yet, the two trees are not mentioned in the poem. Also, in the poem the mother raises her arm and points at the east, whereas in the picture, it is the boy who shows the sky with his hand.

In his Blake’s Composite Art, Mitchell explains that in the poem, Blake uses a pictorial allusion to the theme of a guardian angel presenting a human soul to God. This allusion completes an evolution in the consciousness which is clear in the text: the black boy realizes that in spite of his color he is equal or even superior to the white boy (“I am black, but Oh! My soul is white”) because he had to undergo lots of suffering (ironically referred to as “bearing the beams of love”. The poem starts with the white boy (“white as an angel”) and the black boy in miserable condition (“bereaved of light”); however, the design shows a reversal of roles.                                                                           (1978, 12)

    In the other song with the same title, the design shows a white boy leaning on the knee of the shepherd-Christ. The black boy stands behind him to “stroke his silver hair.” The picture portrays a grazing herd of sheep and a willow tree which is the emblem of paradise. None of these details are included in the text. These features indicate a heavenly state before the black boy’s eyes. While it is the text of the first poem that bears a pictorial allusion, in the second title, the allusion goes to the visual image itself. In the picture of the first song, the boy and his mother appear at the top of the design next to a river, whereas in the second picture, the black and white boys appear with Christ at the bottom of the picture. In both combinations, pictures seem to be only literal translations of the texts because they can be regarded as independent works of art on their own.

Infant Joy

Blake wrote his “Infant Joy” mostly in monosyllabic words and a melodious, smooth language. Although he is not old enough to speak (he is only two days old), he expresses his natural and deep happiness by a sweet smile which can by paralleled with the bleating of a lamb.

       Robert N. Essick writes that the child’s smile signifies his joy and what it says is a translation into language of what he says through its expressive signs. The child’s smile is a visual companion to the host of auditory natural signs that echo in Blake’s Songs of Innocence: crying, laughing, sighing, shouting, bleating, birds’ songs, shriek, howl,… .(1989, 110-11)                                                                                                                                                      

The poem is about a deep affection between mother and child, which at a deeper level indicates Christ’s love and compassion. The elements of love, birth, uninhibited sexuality, and natural joy are discernible in the visual image of the poem, too.

Explaining the visual image of the poem, Hagstrum writes:

“The words alone introduce only two speakers, the child and the mother. The presence in the design … of an unsuspected third figure whose hands are raised in awe, adds dramatic ambiguity – but also makes the scene both an Annunciation and a Holy Birth. The text alone has no suggestion of stem, leaf, or flower – important details for the flame-flower and the pendant bud suggest sexual experience and birth, and the spiny stem and angular leaves anticipate the world of Experience.”                                                            (1964, 6)

The design and border of “Infant Joy” enlarges its meaning, yet the poem says nothing about the third person (a winged angel) who appears in the design, nor is there any plant or flower (that signifies womb) in the poem. The infant’s face shows no smile of joy but it evidently expresses security and tranquility.

Songs of Experience

Songs of Experience were published after Songs of Innocence. Although, there are some similarities between the two collections of poems, Experience is almost different.

Hagstrum describes the quality of these songs beautifully:

The tree of Innocence is large and healthy, its branches entwined in a natural embrace; but it anticipates the Fall in the serpentine creeper that often winds its trunk. The tree of Experience is dry and dying, its withering branches form round arches over the page as its spiky twigs invade the text; but its shape and the few sprays that still shoot recall its primal vigor. Experience is related to Innocence as a fossil is to a living creature.

He also adds:

Experience is not primarily a state of nature; it is a psychological, political, social- a condition of man and his institutions…. Experience is the work of church, state and man in society.                                                                                                             (1964, 78)

In this section, I will discuss about some major poems of Songs of Experience, which include: The Tyger, the School Boy, and Chimney Sweeper.

The Tyger

The Tyger is, perhaps, apart from the words to the hymn Jerusalem, the best known of all Blake’s works. As the contrary poem to The Lamp, The Tyger is straight from the heart of the Songs of Experience. While there are many interpretations of The Tyger, and some critics such as Marsh, have read into it very deeply, coming to the conclusion that it is a poem that addresses our “constant struggle to decode, interpret and master the world around us” as well as Satire on the ways we attempt to carry this task out, I think that The Tyger is poem that addresses the creation of evil in the world. More specifically, in the context of Blake’s other work and personal opinion, as a subtle message that the creation of the Establishment was a creation of a great evil. The Tyger is a poem full of rich, powerful imagery and sound.

The more the speaker ponders The Tyger, the more outstanding its Creators power seems. This power that the Creator is indicated to have is important to the development of the poems message and it is here that the ambiguous areas of the poem must be interpreted; that the tiger is unable to be “framed” may be read as the inability of  anything to control or “capture” it. Not even the immense power of the Creator is able to constrain the evil that it has created. It is here that the main point of the poem is made, and this is done principally through irony- the Creator has created a beast burning so brightly of evil that it even “shines” from the forests of Experience, of such immense evil that it’s own Creator can not control or “frame” it. This evil, in the context of Blake’s other works may be read as the Establishment and thus, The Tyger may be read as a subtle attack on it’s overwhelming evil and hypocrisy. The Tyger has long been recognized as one of Blake’s finest poems.

In his ‘Life of William Blake’, biographer Alexander Gilchrist relates that the poem “happens to have been quoted often enough… to have made its strange old Hebrew-like grandeur, its Oriental latitude yet force of eloquence comparatively familiar”.

The essayist and critic Charles Lamb also wrote of Blake: “I have heard of his poems, but have never seen them. There is one to a tiger …which is glorious!”

            Many critics have focused on the symbolism in The Tyger frequently contrasting it with the language, images and questions of origin presented by its “innocent” counterpart, The Lamb.

            E.D Hirsch, Jr. for instance, noted that while The Tyger satirizes the lyrics found in The Lamb that is not the poems primary function.

Jerome J McGann, however, asserts in his essay in1973 about the poem “…The Tyger tempts us to a cognitive apprehension but in the end exhausts our efforts.” As a result, he concludes, “the extreme diversity of opinion among critics of Blake about the meaning of particular poems and passages of poems is perhaps the most eloquent testimony we have to the success of his work.”

Published in 1794 as one of the Songs of Experience, Blake’s The Tyger is a poem about the nature of creation, much as is his earlier poem from Songs of Innocence, The Lamb. However, this poem is concerned about the darker side of creation, when its benefits are less obvious than simple joys. Blake’s simplicity in language and construction contradicts the complexity of his ideas. This poem is meant to be interpreted in comparison and contrast to The Lamb, showing the “two contrary states of the human soul” with respect to creation.

 It has been said many times that Blake believed that a person had to pass through an innocent state of being, like that of the lamb, and also absorb the contrasting conditions of experience, like those of the tiger, in order to reach a higher level of consciousness.

In any case, Blake’s vision of a creative force in the universe making a balance of innocence and experience is at the heart of this poem. The poem’s speaker is never identified and so may be more closely aligned with Blake himself than in his other poems.

One interpretation could be that it is the Bard from the Introduction to the Songs of Experience walking through the ancient forest and encountering the beast within himself, or the material world. The poem reflects primarily the speaker’s response to the tiger, rather than the tiger’s response to the world. He wrote most of his work before the Romantic Movement in English literature, during the opening stages of the Industrial Revolution, and in the midst of revolutions all over Europe and America.

The School Boy

On first reading The School Boy is the voice of a young boy complaining of being shut inside at his schoolwork instead of playing outside in the sun. When we look at the poem closer we can see that the poem is returning to the theme of childhood subjugated and its natural joy destroyed that can be seen in other poems in the collection such as The Chimney Sweeper in Experience with its comparison of the child who was ‘happy on the heath’ to now “Crying weep in notes of woe!”

A close comparison of The School Boy can be made to The Ecchoing Green in Innocence. Both poems’ talk of children but The Ecchoing Green gives us a picture of them at idyllic play in a natural setting.

The Ecchoing Green is full of images of children in the pastoral and nature typical of Innocence while The School Boy shows children taken from these images and subdued, making it more typical of the poem’s in Experience.

Chimney Sweeper

The Chimney Sweeper poem addresses the hardships that faced children destined to the life of a chimney sweep in the late 18th century in London. The poem also may refer to the sufferings of all child laborers and can be considered as an attack on the Establishment that maintained poverty. The voice of the poem is enthusiasm. 4
The Chimney Sweeper like The Tyger reflects Blake’s political and social beliefs. He is actually attacking what he considers injustice, evil, and suffering in the world.

If we look at this poem carefully, we can feel that the child is hopeful. Also, the design does not visualize the text, and does not reveal the hope or happiness, which is indicated in the poem.

The Chimney Sweeper in Experience develops the same situation as the poem by the same title in the Innocence collection, but it is from a different perspective. In this poem, there are clearly three different views of the sweeps situation; his own; his parents and an observer. From the first reading it is clear that the young sweep feels exploited that his parents are self justifying, seeking only to pacify their own consciences and that the observer feels both pity and outrage.

Overall, the poem is an attack by Blake on the hypocrisy of the Church and of the wider Establishment. 5[

Conclusion:

Blake’s works are famous because of their composite art, which made him different from his contemporary artists. He wanted to develop an especial and unique technology and style by mixing painting and poetry.

Blake was then a man fiercely angry at the Establishment as a whole. In Blake’s London however, the strictly social and moral codes of society prevented his work ever becoming acceptable; rejected by the mainstream of society as the creations of a mad man, poems like the works of Wordsworth were those that sold.

The 21st century was, however, with a vastly different social and political climate than that in which Blake lived. People are now freer than ever to pursue their own beliefs and as such, Blake’s work has come under increasing attention. As a result, his poetry has been extensively commented upon as has his use of traditional form and metrical artistry to attack the Church and the wider Establishment.

Those poems discussed; The Chimney Sweeper/s and The Tyger are all poems that reflect Blake’s political and social beliefs, urging us, to adopt them and join him in attacking what he saw as the primary cause of evil, injustice and suffering in a “world of plenty”; the Church and the wider Establishment

Regarding his Composite Art, again Mitchell adds that, the pictures or designs have many relations, and the reduplicate the verbal scene. More often they are visual translation of Blake’s metaphors. And, Blake’s purpose of using this illustration is to represent the personifications of the poem and to give visual form to his personifications.     (1964, 18)

                   Also, using designs make meaning more precise, and something they widen the imaginative resonances, or not they serve as an important aesthetic or semantic aim.                                                                                                                                                   (1964,

Sometimes the design repeats the words. More often the designs complement the words in such a way as to insure that on almost every plate. If we consider border and design as well as word, Blake’s entire paradise is shown.                                              (1964, 77)                                  

Blake’s illuminated books indeed emphasize his theory that “without contraries is no progression”. The independency of the component parts is, however, the reason for the unity of his composite art, and for this his illuminated books are the most integrated forms of the visual-verbal art.

 Blake himself believed that making poetry visual and making pictures “speak” was imperfect, because it presumed the independent reality of space and time.

   In short, his poetry invalidates the idea of objective time and his painting invalidates the idea of objective space. In other words, his poetry proves the power of human imagination to create time in its own image, and his painting affirms the centrality of the human body as the structural principle of space. Indeed, the unity of his art can be found in the equal engagements of imagination and body.                                            (1978, 34)

He endeavored to invade man’s soul by the avenues of more than one sense; his art and thoughts moved towards a unity. He modeled the sister arts as they have never been before or since, into a single body; his union of the arts created a new form – an art of arts. The independency of Blake’s illustration can be understood when there are illustrations, which do not illustrate a text.

 Blake’s two different forms of his work should be considered separately. The text can be compared with other text and the design with the other one. The independence of Blake’s text and designs lets him introduce independent symbolic statements, state some ironic contrasts and multiply metaphorical complexities.

  Northrop Frye explains this independency in a different way:

… The independence of Blake’s designs from his words is rather surprising in view of the prevailing conventions within which he worked. The tradition of historical painting …tended to dictate a slavish fidelity to the text, and the naive allegories of the emblem books were generally an attempt to simplify the verbal meaning.                        (1978, 14)

    Also, Mitchell suggests that there are three main consequences for the practice of poetry and painting together.

 It encouraged a belief in transferability of techniques from one medium to another.

That meant the idea that the coupling of the two arts provides a fuller imitation of the total reality.                                                                                                            (1978, 17)

As Mitchell explains, Blake’s illustrated books has its own “inter-animating principles”, that is a specific poetic form or structure of images and values, and a distinctive pictorial style that interacts with this poetic form. Blake’s composite art achieves its “wholeness”, at different levels of poetic pictorial forms. This unity is also active and dynamic, and is based on the interaction of text and design as contrary or independent element.                                                                                                                     (1978, 16)

If we evaluate Blake’s painting and poems, we may conclude that, although they are different, they are almost equal in value.

In short, illustrations in Blake’s work may be used for understanding the meaning of the text, for the decoration of the text, or for visualizing the text. Painting can give life to the text. These roles can also be considered for a text. The text may be painted meaningfully and decorates the pages.

Although, there is not sometimes any relation between the text and its illustration, we can say that the painting can decorate the poem and is pleasant to the eyes of the viewer. It was a new technique at that time and also very interesting.

Bibliography

1.Hagstrum, Jean, H. William Blake: Poet and Painter, The university of Chicago Press, 1964.

  2.Essick, Robert N. William Blake and the Language of Adam, 1989.

3.J.Mc Gann, Jerome, William Blake Illuminates the Truth, 1989.

4.Mitchell, Adrian. Contemporary British Dramatists. St. James Press, 1994.

5.Frye Northrop, Culture and Literature, 1978.

6.Gardner, Stanley. Blake’s Innocence and Experience Retracted. London, Athlone, 1986.

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Exhibitions: Temporary Programme

The temporary exhibitions programme got underway with exhibitions by Cuban-American Jorge Pardo and Irish artist Anne Tallentire which continue until 3 May. Widely regarded as one of the most inventive artists of his generation, Pardo follows his participation in IMMA’s 2006 Lunar Reggae show with an exploration of the place of art within new media. His highly conceptual virtual retrospective takes the form of photomural wallpaper, covering the entire gallery space and incorporating every aspect of the exhibition. Anne Tallentire, much praised for the originality of her work, presents recent projects and related pieces focusing on how the ordering, or disordering, of things can signify everyday social and cultural determinants. Juxtaposing action, object and image she employs a range of media from text to photography and film. The exhibition includes a number of collaborative projects, another regular feature of Tallentire’s work.

Exhibition: Francis Alys

An exhibition by leading Belgian-born experimental artist Francis Alys continues until 23 May, inspired by his personal observations from the many cities to which his compulsive wanderings have taken him. Alys works in a variety of media, and at IMMA presents his major series of paintings, Le Temps du Sommeil, which now numbers 111 works; some still being works in progress. The series travels to Tate Modern in June, the first stage in a major international retrospective of Alys’s work.

Exhibition: Vertical Thoughts

Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts From 31 March the exhibition Vertical Thoughts focuses on the work of the influential 20th-century American composer Morton Feldman and the many celebrated visual artists with whom he was closely associated. In 1967 Feldman curated an exhibition entitled Six Painters in Houston, Texas, and Vertical Thoughts takes its inspiration from that, presenting the work of such legendary figures as Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and many others not featured in the 1967 show. The exhibition also includes music scores, record covers, photographs and documents, as well as Oriental rugs, which influenced the composer’s work. A film and music programme will accompany the exhibition.

Exhibitions: Carlos Caraicoa and Ferran Garcia Sevilla

The Latin flavour continues on 9 June with exhibitions by Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa and Spanish painter Ferran Garcia Sevilla. Employing a multi-disciplinary approach embracing architecture, narrative, history, and politics, Carlos Garaicoa uses his native city of Havana as a laboratory to construct provocative commentaries on a range of contemporary issues. These include architecture’s ability to alter the course of history, the failure of modernism as a catalyst for social change and the decay of 20th-century utopias. Ferran García Sevilla’s eclectic style draws on his world travels, and on comic books, urban graffiti, philosophy and Eastern cultures, resulting in sensuous open spaces in which everything, including iconography and ideas, blends together. His raw, colorful, primitive canvases are often peppered with caustic, hand-scrawled commentaries on life and politics.

Collection Exhibitions at The Irish Museum of Modern Art

The Museum’s Collection takes centre stage from 20 October, when all of the galleries will be devoted to the first of a two-part exhibition of works from IMMA’s own Collection. This will be the first time that the entire Museum has been given over to the Collection, in an ambitious project leading up to and continuing into IMMA’s 20th anniversary year in 2011. Part one of the exhibition, entitled, The Moderns, will trace important artistic events and developments from the early 1900s to the 1970s, presenting some 100 artists through approximately 250 works. In addition, key pieces from other public and private collections will help to form the historical and contextual thread of the exhibition.

Exhibitions: What Happens Next is a Secret and Altered Images

Another Collection exhibition, entitled What happens next is a secret, runs until 18 April. This addresses the intriguing question of what happens when works become part of a collection and are subsequently shown in different contexts. During the course of the exhibition works will be removed, pointing to the often hidden nature of museum collections, while replacements will create new associations. Works from the Collection are also featured in Altered Images, which aims to stimulate engagement with the visual arts by the general public and particularly by those with disabilities. A joint project between Mayo County Council, South Tipperary County Council and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, as part of the Museum’s National Programme, the exhibition has already met with an extremely positive response when shown in Clonmel and Ballina in 2009. Meanwhile, the carefully-planned growth in the Collection continues with the acquisition in 2009 of 52 prints by the celebrated American-born artist Mary Farl Powers, generously donated by the artist’s family, and other donated works, including those by Lynda Benglis, Alan Phelan and a joint work by Seamus Heaney and Felim Egan.

Exhibitions: Personal Collection of Brian O’Doherty and Barbara Novak

This most welcome trend continues in 2010 with the gift of several works from the personal collection of artist Brian O’Doherty and art theorist Barbara Novak. The collection ranges across American art of the 20th century, particularly that of the 1960s and ‘70s, and includes the work of such celebrated artists as Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. An exhibition from the collection will open on 8 September. A further gift of some 30 fine art prints by the Graphic Studio Dublin, being made to mark the studio’s 50th anniversary, will also be celebrated with an exhibition, again opening on 8 September, highlighting the role of fine art printing in the development of Contemporary Irish art.

Loans from the Collection

From 14 January to 27 February William Hogarth’s famous prints, A Harlot’s Progress, from the Madden Arnholz Collection at IMMA, are being shown as part of City of Women, at The Lab, Foley Street, Dublin. Loans from the Collection will also travel to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Musée de la Ville de Strasbourg and the Sprengel Museum, Hannover. Meanwhile, the five-year loan of 22 works by Irish artists to the Irish Embassy in The Hague continues until 2012.

National Programme Exhibitions

In addition to the exhibitions at IMMA, the Collection will also be shown in a number of arts centres and other locations around Ireland, as part of IMMA’s National Programme, an area in which the Museum has led the way as a truly national institution over the past 13 years. In April an exhibition of work from the Weltkunst Collection on loan to IMMA since 1994 takes place at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. This significant collection of British sculpture and drawings of the 1980s and ‘90s will return to the Weltkunst Foundation in 2010 and this will be the last showing of works from this collection. In 2010 the programme will continue to develop its commissioning strand by supporting artists’ interventions in response to exhibitions such as Drawing: A performative action at the Cavan County Museum taking place in November. Exploring the physical nature of drawing the exhibition will include work from the IMMA Collection in a variety of media from traditional works on paper to performance work. Further projects with County Arts Offices will also be much in evidence in the coming year.

Graphic designers are the people who carry out the graphic arts in a professional manner, who congregate the images, symbols and words to convey the message in a different manner.  Graphic designing is defined as the practice of designing or creating the printing form and electronic forms of visual information for advertisements, publications and for websites.
Role of a graphic designer
The following are some of the roles and the duties to be accomplished by them.  It is the duty of the graphic designer to organize the various elements to deliver a desired message.
1.    They examine and create effective visual communication to improve the client’s image, product or service.  
2.    The designing is done according to the client’s needs, it is totally client oriented.  The designer and the clients work together to create a best way to implement the client’s message.   An effective graphic designer brings the artistic and strategic skills and works out for the designing process.
3.    They should make the clients understand that communicating via graphics could create a pleasing image to their business.   A healthy relationship between the designer and the client helps both of them to enhance their business.
4.    This field has changed a lot technically, but the job profile of the graphic designers still remains the same.
5.    They analyze and bring out problems to the solution visually, they utilize the best way to spread message, so it reaches the end users quickly.  They present the newspapers in an attractive way and also prepare logos for the products.  Through this way, they are helpful in all the levels of designing process.
Elements used in graphic designing process
-    The central part of any design is the element.  Like principles, elements help to balance and complement the graphics.  One of the basic graphic design elements is line.   When lines are used skillfully, it enhances the form and the message of a design.
-    Shapes convey meaning and organize design simultaneously.
-    Mass examines the shape size and determines how well it fits on the page.
-    Colors are used to create the atmosphere, they desire.  Colors highly help out to balance the graphics.
-    Texture provides visual surface and it adds a spark to the graphics.
-    Space provides stability and elegance.
Graphic designers are practical artists who indulge themselves to provide service to the clients. They use illustration, color, photography and animation for implementation in printing, websites, graphics and other forms of visual communication.  Kelowna and Vancouver has various graphic designers to choose from.  The website related to designing process provides the list of graphic designers present in Kelowna and Vancouver, so it is your option to choose the best and professional out of them.

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Will they stay inside? Creating Visual Impressions

Images and design can elicit different emotional responses from people. These images can make people like or dislike, believe something is fun or more serious, and can even make someone trust or distrust a company or an idea. It can be difficult to tow the line between emotionally-provoking or bland images. So how does someone design graphic art for both?

Measurements to develop your baseline

Know your data – how long do your users who entered through a specific website door stay? Which type/segment of users are converting? What is your conversion optimization rate? What are the other quality metrics you use to measure your sites and your ads effectiveness? Once you have your benchmark established then you can evaluate the changes you make.

Some things to consider when designing and placing graphics on your website:

First and Foremost: Users do not stay at a site because it is pretty, but they will leave if it is ugly.

What emotion are you looking to elicit: Excitement? Trust? A bit of Shock?

People will associate things about your company based on your unique graphic design. Richly designed websites tend to make people trust companies, get them excited about your offerings and understand your unique selling proposition.

Always consider the impact of where you place graphic art; is it efficiently getting your user where they want to be? Would a different location on the screen elicit a better response?

The most interesting or noticeable visual element on your homepage should usually serve as one of the main purposes of your site (driving users to a specific product or your inquiry form, answering a specific question, eliciting an emotional response).

It is critical to update the look of your site every 2-3 years because it is easy to fall behind a design paradigm. If you redesign your website every few years, you can capture the best design elements and technology tools that other sites are leveraging for their potential customers. It is critical to update the look of your site often but not too often. You can often do this by simply changing the graphics and some colors without replacing all of the content. Phew!

Goals, trust and measure:

Of course it goes without saying: define and know your goals and your wins, striving for increases from your benchmark data. Next, trust your creative team to collaborate and try new ideas. Your ideas of the “best” graphics can be complimented by others experiences and others fresh perspectives. Then measure and make changes until you reach your goals.

As a custom software and graphic design company, our creative services team at Amadeus Consulting is concerned with these principles because we aim to provide you with graphic design services that have an impact for your user and for your bottom line.