Teleidoscope

Thu, Nov 09, 2006

RT Computer Graphics

Posted at 10:08 pm MST to Media

Or why the Mirrors are Southwestern art when so much of the philosophy is Asian and European.

When I was first creating the Net of Mirrors, more than a dozen years ago, I needed to have images to put on the cards. I can do an adequate job of design and layout, but I have no particular skill at any representational art.

I was willing to pay reasonable amounts of money for materials for what was effectively a hobby, not a business. I like books and typography, so I bought real licensed fonts from Adobe and other professional type-foundries and spent serious money for a laser printer with PostScript capability (which cost 10 times as much as my current laser printer, even ignoring inflation). I also bought various Adobe Type Manager tools for OS/2 and Windows, so between that and the fonts I ended up on some professional-graphics-designer customer.

I love the Publishing Perfection catalog. I just can't often justify buying from it, especially since my home systems have generally been OS/2 and Linux and most of the products they carry are aimed at the PC and Mac. (My wallet is glad there are good open-source fonts these days...)

Willingness to buy doesn't help if there is nothing to be bought, even with sources for professional grade clipart and tools. The vast majority of the clipart that was available in the early 90s seemed to be either business-related or (mostly Protestant) Christian religious, which wasn't much help to me for illustratng the Mirrors. (I thought that much of it was hideous, too, but that was a separate problem.)

The major exception was the Santa Fe Collection from RT Computer Graphics www.rtcomputer.com in New Mexico, a set of Southwestern and Native American images and motifs that supported the richness of symbolism and abstration that I needed.

The original edition of the Santa Fe collection came on floppies and was, I think, all black and white.

The second edition came on a CD and included color versions, and GIFs for use on websites, since the web was becoming important by then. They added other packages added to the product line over the years: one of Plains Indian art, one of Petroglyphs and art inspired by petroglyphs, one of Cowboy images.

Their most recent addition is the Santa Fe Collection II, about half of which is business-related and holiday clipart with a Southwestern and Native American skew. I found this a little disappointing, but my uses for clipart are fairly peculiar.

I now own all but the Cowboy package. The Santa Fe II and Petroglyph Collections just arrived a few days ago.

Expect to see little petroglyph people doing strange things around the blog and website in the future.

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