Other Sites

Art Nouveau Flowers & Plants
Direct Imagination
www.dimagin.com
(888) 793-8387
$139

Review by Gary Coyne

From a beautiful craftsman style house in north Pasadena, the crew of Direct Imagination collects images from old sources, then scan some, redraw others in Illustrator and make them available to all on CDs. They get paid to do this. We should all have such jobs.

They do beautiful work of beautiful work. You want to see some? Go to their web site.

This new collection (which was premiered at MacWorld but doesn't even show up on their web site as a completed task yet) is a reproduction of the entire M.P. Verneuit's Étude de la Plante and contains all 391 plates (310 pages of text) of plants in nature and the plant's design motives which are done in Art Nouveau. Historically, Art Nouveau used botanical images as a basis for many of the artistic relief of the time. Looking through these images, one is constantly reminded of images seen in old magazines, buildings, movies, and artwork of the period.

In the book, images are often placed successively showing a botanical drawing followed by an artistic rendition of the same plant. As seen in the example below, on the right is Figure #31 showing samples of Porillon (Daffodil), and on the left is Figure 34 showing an artistic interpretation of the same plant. (Please note that all graphics in this review have been substantially reduced in size to speed up page transmission over the web. The image qualities presented here do not really do justice to the drawings presented on the CD.)

The collection is placed on three Adobe Acrobat (pdf) documents.

One, "Art Nouveau.pdf" is the book itself, page by page.

A second document, "Plates.pdf" is a collection of all the scanned drawings from the book placed as "buttons" on 13 pages, or plates.

Each drawing on the plate is a hot-spot allowing you to go to a full size image of each drawing by clicking on that drawing. These images are in pdf, in150 dpi, and the JPEG versions are scanned at 300 dpi. Once a specific drawing is clicked and in view, there is a button on the right side of the screen that will open that image in Photoshop (assuming that you have Photoshop on your computer). Each scan of the book's material has been completed at very high resolution. For example, the image (not the link-button shown on this page) of the tuberculeuse in the upper left in the picture above is 2143 x 1342 pixels.

Finally, a third document called "EPS.pdf" contains eps (encapsulated postscript) versions of 110 drawings from the collection.

Like the Plate.pdf, if you click on any image shown above, you are brought to a page featuring just that one image. On each of the one image pages, you can click on a button called "Illustrator" and (if you have Illustrator (or Freehand) on your computer, the image will open in Illustrator (or Freehand). This means that each image is editable if you want to change the colors or shape, but mostly since you are now working with vector graphics, there is no pixilation at any resolution. That means you could print posters the size of your house and it would look as nice as a postage stamp poster.

So, who is this CD for? Well, consider art historians, artists, crafts people, interior designers, people working with textiles, decorators, graphic designers, botanists, students--get the idea? If looking at these images doesn't give you ideas, you probably don't need them.

There is one other type of user for this CD I could mention: people who speak French. I bring this up because of the one major disappointment with the CD. The book was originally written in French, and no attempt was made to provide a translation for those of us who are linguistically challenged. Interestingly, there are two areas where a translation is provided. One is the Table of Contents showing the names of the chapters, and second is the Index showing the flower's names in either their French, English, or botanical names. The former providing a hot-link to that chapter and the latter provides hot-link page numbers where all examples of those flowers can be found. There is a momentary hope that if one clicks on the English name of a chapter it will bring up an English version of the text, but alas no. There is only a French version of the text. I can see where a translator would have caused a price increase of the CD and this might have caused a decrease in the potential audience. Either way it's a loss for some group of people.

Direct Imagination's goal is to take (otherwise) unavailable art books and make them available to a new audience, not to provide translation services. I understand the decision, just wish I paid more attention to my French in high school.

Although not clip-art in the truest sense, these items can be used as such. Therefore, Direct Imagination has some very reasonable guidelines as to how one can legally use them. They have different guidelines and restrictions for either the scanned or the eps drawings. But, as is stated in their "Read Me" file, "DI strives to be flexible and responsive to its customer's needs. If you have an application that conflicts with any portion of this license, DI urges you to contact them, Toll-Free, at their offices in Pasadena at (888) 793-8387."

In short, even if your French is weak, there is lots to learn and observe in this CD. If you are looking for designs, motifs, and inspirations, you would be well served to get this CD. But darn I wish my French was better.

Applelinks Rating

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.