The Ultimate Dead Artists Web Design Team

Current commentators on website design are predicting the re-emergence of hand drawn and painted images within web design. The last ten years has seen the skill of drawing and mark marking reduced to the level of computer coding and led to a feeling of sameness within content.  Artists capable of free hand draughtsmanship offer companies a quirky, fresh feel to sites and a more natural, ergonomic rendering. So if the experts are correct we can look forward to some innovative and engaging websites this year.

What would happen if time were no obstacle, which of the great masters would have been at the forefront of Internet design, creating today’s must see websites. These ten artists have the vision, skill, and style that could easily be used to illustrate web sites.

1) Leonardo Da Vinci – The innovator, designer, engineer, Da Vinci would have been the ultimate e-commerce specialist and affiliate marketer. Everyone would have been logging on his strange inventions pages for the latest on parachutes and helicopters. Picture any page from his famous sketchbooks and imagine his what his product pages would look like. His painting skills as well would have lent themselves to excellent corporate event paintings like the last supper, and “meet the team” all with Mona Lisa smiles.

2) Hieronymus Bosch – Home pages designed by this fifteenth century genius would have been a surfer’s paradise. The paintings themselves beg more, they look like they should have hot links to other paintings and information pages. The weird creatures and people that populate his worlds, definitely make for interesting icons and buttons.

3) John Speed – A painter and cartographer, the series of maps and associated landscapes he painted around Britain in the seventeenth century are so interesting, they containing hidden depth of detail. If you were an adventurer back then you would have Speed geotag your newly discovered island. This is Google earth of its day.

4) Giovanni Antonio Canaletto – Many websites contain beautifully lit, romantic shots of sun kissed beaches, evocative marketplaces and breathtaking landscapes. No travel website would miss the chance of having Canaletto produce their destination guides. His luscious paintings are such wonderfully detailed and polished locations; you only have to look at his Venice paintings to develop an intense desire to visit the city.

5) James Gilray – Cartoonist, engraver and satirical political commentator of his day. Any company with a blog that needs illustrated comment on the farce of the day, would be emailing Gilray. You only have to look at his cutting prints about Napoleon to wonder what this sardonic wit would have made of Brown, Berlusconi and Putin.

6) Titian – These days most corporate sites are full of happy smiling images of their staff, Titan is the man for the portrait, he'd give you a memorable avatar. A difficult choice as there are so many excellently qualified individuals, Durer, Van Dyck, Holbien and Gilbert Stuart but Titian portraits have a nobility and sophistication to them, he posses his sitters well and would create a sophisticated corporate image for you.

7) Hannah Hoch – Hoch’s revolutionary paintings and prints at the turn of the twentieth century using newly available photographic techniques are still resonant of flyers and posters found every weekend on walls and lampposts in every city. They are the landing pages of any advertising campaign, full of bold brash images, randomly positioned words and bright eye catching colour. Online advertising campaigners would rush to her door for interesting pages from which to ensnare their customers.

8) Joan Miro – The Surrealist painter Miro’s works are a mass of strange doodles, images and animals, web designers looking for unique and engaging buttons, toggles and switches will find his works offer a totally different approach to their viewers. When you look at his paintings you feel as if the graphics form part of some strange machine you can control and operate.

9) William Morris – A lover of things natural, the eco-warrior of his day with his call for “truth to materials”. Morris’s sumptuous patterns and design were the borders and wallpapers of his day and would not look out of place on many a site today. His sense rendering of the natural world, leaves, fruits and fabrics are an automatic choice for food, fashion or interior design sites.

10) Andy Warhol – King of Pop Art, the man who used the media of his day to its full, if he had survived you can be he would take on the full social network gambit. You’d be a member of his Twitter circle, he’d make YouTube clips and everyone would be downloading his podcasts. Product packaging and promotion were his forte, his work was the result of commercial interpretation and the designs for his sites would have been a media rich location.

I am sure there will be detractors who insist Picasso, Dali and Turner would be in the running, Marcel Duchamp and Otto Dix were great commentators of their age and Monet for his subtlety or Caravaggio as the ultimate storyteller. If you have ten vacancies, I think this is your design team but I somehow know you’ll disagree.