Artshow ’91

A5 format 150 pages, glitter cover, perfect bound.

This book is a tribute Corel Artshow books/CD-ROMs from early-mid 90s. Corel Draw used to be a software similar to Photoshop, but it is not so used anymore since Adobe conquered the market. In the 90s instead, Corel Draw was on the verge of desktop publishing graphic design and had a long running worldwide art contest for their Corel Draw line of programs. Each resulting in a coffee table book showcasing the entries, and a CD with the original files, called ARTSHOW.

I managed to buy on e-bay some of those original books but unfortunately the images on the CD were low res and pixelated. I fell in love with the 90’s aesthetic strongly connected to the low software functions available at the time, so I decided I had to bring those images back to life somehow. I started playing around with them into my AI software, and I asked it to re-design a bunch of them at the best of its possibilities, in hi res this time, here in this book you can see the final results of this experiment.

I enjoyed the part where AI had to understand/codify the weirdest and smallest graphic elements, in low res, and put them into an hi res image without the help of a text in the Prompt, in fact I was using only the image-to-image function. AI managed to “understand” almost all of them, even if sometimes the final effect was not so close to the original image. On the other hand, It kept the original look and feel so I decided to include those unexpected images in the book anyway.