The Relatives of Art

I'd like to kick things off by shouting out a Kuler website for the new color layout.
I just finished doing a web page and I started thinking about how integrated the whole art system is. Web design is one of the most modern forms of "art". You visit a page that looks like crap and think "there's no way the information here can be beneficial." Some with driving down the road and seeing business with those big black boards with fluorescent letters on them, or spray painted boards, you think "that place has to suck." Maybe that's just me.
With that said, it all goes back to graphic design before you venture into web design. Posters, signs, packaging that all looks good makes one more inclined to favor a product over another. Pepsi's current packing is very plain, much like Stella Artois' packaging it's a logo and plain box, but it looks goooood (Pepsi's logo I'm not a fan of). The same thing with web sites. Some web sites look like they worked very hard, some where built in flash or java. But the good sites still apply to basics of typography and use grid systems to organize web pages with harmony, balance, and repetition.
We know to click 'home' to go back because we call it the 'home page'.
Even before that, before design we had paintings, sculptures, fine arts. Hand crafted, beautifully conducted, ART! Something I preach to be of a dying breed and truly a decaying seed (as you can see with those big block boards with fluorescent letters, and the fact no one cares if you can paint well.) Getting off track a little, the reason people don't care if you are good at backgammon or chess is because people don't play it and don't have frame of reference for how difficult it actually is to be good at it. It is hard. It's more time consuming than other crafts, less room to fail that some other crafts (Like the Super Mario Galaxy poster that had stars for the letters to spell U R Mr. Gay. The poster is a little outdated because they re did it after probably a couple hundred million went out world wide... fail.)
Before Pepsi had a fat side, before Mario was Mr. Gay, before java script, there was the Bauhaus, there was expressionism, impressionism, The Renaissance. There was fine art. The same ideas apply. Kandinsky did it, so did Muller-Brockmann. You won't notice it without knowing the principles and elements of design, but there's balance, harmony, space, line, and so much more. It's applied differently in both of these which differentiates styles and eras. Josef Muller-Brockmann is one who made design art, which as my proffessor says "design isn't art... good design is art."

Good literature is art. Good cooking is art. Good painting is art. Good sports play is art. The principles and elements art there for all of these, harmony, repetition, space, line, form, etc. Apply it differently. Apply it two-dimensionally, or three-dimensionally but it makes art in it's own right.

Or at least I like to think so.