13 Jun 2007
Abstract: I’ve just been pointed to a post by Andy , called Five Principles to Design By by Joshua Porter. It’s a very good post, but point 2 has set some alarm bells off in my head once again. Design is not art. That old chestnut. This keeps coming up recently. Why? I’ve no idea but it’s beginning to bug me. Here’s my take on it all…
Leeanne says: I have often thought that people who say ‘design is not art’ have no real idea what design is. If a designer were to say it to me I would seriously have to say that this person is not a designer at all, simply someone who is concerned with production and sees what they do as a job.
Designers do not make graphics (that is production). Designers produce ideas. Then turn those ideas into visual communications. Art is also about ideas, and those ideas are also (mostly) turned into visual communications. The only difference being that artists do it to meet their personal needs and designers do it to meet the needs of others.
But ultimately we are each in the business of communicating, we each bring to those communications our own individual life experiences, knowledge and preferences, and this influences what those communications look like and how they make people feel.
As designers, If who we were and how our life expereince has shaped us did not influence our work then we would all produce the same solution to a given brief - and as anyone who has ever sat through a group crit at art college will tell you, this is never the case. I’ve seen 20 designers bring 20 different solutions to a single brief, each very unique in not only the initial idea but also in the execution of that idea. Sure, not all of them successful - but then again not all artists produce masterpieces either.
