Saturday, March 31, 2007

Art Nouveau design vs Psychedelic design

Art Nouveau design is a style of art which began popular in the beginning of the 20th century. It appears in many fields including graphic design, architecture and even jewel design The following pictures are examples about it.



Poster by Alfons Mucha


picture from http://www.gregorbooks.com/gregor/images/items/16225.jpg



From these pictures, we can see that this style uses a lot of decorative details even in typography. Its design usually have apperances of flowers and plants or plant-like objects (for example in the staircase picture). With the use of curves and colour (quite colourful), the Art Nouveau designs creates a feeling of elegent and feminine.



Psychedelic Art is an art which gets inspiration from the psychedelic experience which created by using drugs. In this style of art, the artist do not try to resemble the real world. Instead of that, they try to describe the world in human mind. Therefore, they looks quite strange and a bit chaotic with unrelated images appears in the same picture.


The cover for the album Abraxas of Carlos Santana



About the use of colours, psychedelic designs are pretty similar to the nouveau designs. They are both use a lot of colours (most of them are bright colours). They also use a lot of decorative details and the appearance of plant. However, the Art Nouveau designs use details to add up to one main object while in the Psychedelic design, it is hard to tell which object is the center of the picture.

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