Artists of the past have used many mediums to project their imaginations. The newest realm of Computer Graphics has sparked an enormous amount of creativity in film and the music industry. The next medium is obviously using the web as a direct presentation layer. Yet the tools used to create the presentation are often not geared for the artist’s workflow and make many artists compromise visually to reach one form of their goal. A visual artist modifies space, either 2D or 3D. In the physical world, canvas, cardboard or any surface is used. However, within the digital domain it is the monitor that becomes the palette. Coming of age in internet form, software engineers need to give artists more effective use of the screen as a canvas and they should allow this in a natural combined tool using the basic form of HTML with a strong emphasis on graphics painting.

Desktop publishing is the closest form of tool that would be appropiate. Yet not exactly as many desktop publishers do not facilitate advanced graphic editing features. But they are extremely precise in layout options that create durable presentations. As well, many digital artists know of their capabilities. The best combination of tool would provide features of applications like Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Front Page, and Swish. The user interface should be as easy as an Apple iMac.

Large backgrounds on web pages combined with absolute positioning are one way in which the entire canvas can be used. Addressing multiple resolutions and cross platform becomes an issue. To really activate the screen with motion, using shockwave or a flash animation is the modern thing to do. Creating the shockwave animation does require third party tools. As well, the player uses its own rendering functions for fonts and textual data. At most times the output is not as refined as the browser's normal output; anti-aliasing and clear-type for example. I propose that all aspects of GUI generation should be combined together under one roof providing complete rendering of vector animation and HTML. This will be the new browser.

Some modifications are needed to enhance the web browser's display. The background image should use a high quality resizing algorithm to enable full screen presentations that are resolution independent. As well, the positioning of the information should be relative to the resized background. Typically when someone uses a canvas, for example, a multidimensional layering and mixing occurs. Currently, the Microsoft Internet explorer is one of the finest browsers that enables the real time mixing of imagery on the client side. But of course this is an advanced function that is rarely supported in the GUI maker’s toolbox. Translucency is especially important if the presentation involves animation.

While it is true that the translucency can be built into the background graphic itself, when the item is being used in a visual state change, it is functional that it exist as a separate element or object. By using relative or absolute positioning to visually communicate greater symbolism can be achieved. It is a characteristic of concrete communication, one displaying symbolism, to be achieved through absolute positions. For example, when reading visual images, one looks at the vertical, horizontal, and perspective alignments to derive meanings. The same can be true of the web page.

In short, the web page creators and web browsers need to modify their rendering algorithms to allow artists more effective use of the space as a painting canvas. Currently Internet Explorer does allow this through the use of filters. Currently, the implementation of a visual filter is very limited and they operate at slow speeds. Shockwave is the current choice for the motion medium. So far it is very effective, yet it is unfortunate that the abilities are only available to the shockwave player; a Box outside of the HTML control. There are some efforts such as SMIL that are interesting. In Final, an artist’s view of a web space is much different.