Whenever I tell someone that I’m a designer, they always end up asking if I can make them a t-shirt. And I get it. As a lifelong music lover, graphic tees hold a special place in my heart. They can be amazing pieces of art that really convey the vibe of both the music and the person wearing them. But importantly, they’re art. Sure some of the skills of design can be helpful in the process of making one, but they really come from an artistic place. So I’ve always been a little confused when I’m asked if I can make one because I’m a designer, not an artist.

I’m not saying that design is never art. Design can be art, all you have to do is look at a building that leaves you in awe of its angles or a piece of furniture that you get a sense of joy from every time you see it. Even marketing for companies like Figma or Linear can be downright beautiful, but that’s not inherent in the medium. You can create the best possible system of components for a design system, designed meticulously down to the very last detail, but that’s not something that’s going to be on display at the MoMA.

But what makes them different? How do you tell when something is art vs design or both? And why did this get mixed up in the first place?

Sides of a coin

Art and design have always been close siblings. Both have been used to amplify each other throughout history, from hieroglyphics to propaganda posters to modern marketing. The problem is that over the past 20 years the job of “graphic designer” has proliferated to every corner of the world. While that’s been a net positive overall, it’s muddied the waters on what being a designer means1.

Art, at least in my book, has one key component: it’s expressive, not necessarily informative2. Its purpose is to express and evoke emotions, whether they be those of the artist or those being elicited in the viewer. It’s a free-form medium with no boundaries or inherent goals. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder because we all see the world from a different perspective, and that means we interpret things differently. Art (at least more often than not) isn’t trying to make you interpret it in any certain way, it’s just trying to make you feel something.

Design can also be expressive and be intended to convey or evoke emotion. But those are really in service of its core motivation: it’s always trying to convey some sort of information to the viewer. Whether that’s the time of an event, the price of a service, or what button is important on a screen, design is always trying to impart some piece of information that is relevant to you in that moment. That makes it much more constrained than art because there’s a need to clearly communicate something specific to the viewer. A designer needs to guarantee people will understand what they are trying to say whereas an artist may not feel that need.

The big mixup

I blame all of this Photoshop. Its proliferation enabled anyone to become both designer and artist, but it also aided in muddying the waters around the definition of creativity. And that misunderstanding is at the heart of this problem. To many, being creative means being an artist, and our world tends to perpetuate that idea. Since design is often seen as a creative practice, it gets lumped in with being an artist.

The problem is that creativity goes well beyond art. Yes, you can express your creativity by writing a poem or taking a photograph. But you can also be creative through problem solving, or always trying to figure out why something works the way that it does. That’s why the line between art and design can be fuzzy sometimes. At its core, being creative means finding new and inventive ways of doing things as much as it means making dope t-shirts. When we automatically equate being creative with creating art, we cut an entire swath of useful creative expression out of the picture. And we can make people who have a lot of creative potential feel as though they could never be “creative” themselves.

Why does it matter?

All of this is a bit nit-picky, especially since there’s plenty of crossover between these two worlds, but the distinction between the two is important. As someone who comes from a more engineering focused side of design, the expectation for me to be an artist has always been a bit alienating.

I understand that for some, anyone can be an artist because anything can be art, but I just don’t buy that. While taste is a spectrum, there is good and bad on each end and some things just aren’t good. So being asked to make art when I know from experience that the end product won’t be something that I’ll define as good, isn’t an experience I want to have.

We need to be willing to admit the differences between art and design so that we can embrace all the different things that can be considered part of the later. Yes, that display ad for an upcoming campaign is design, but so is creating a bomb-ass system in Notion for organizing and referencing all of your team’s meeting notes across the past five years. Design ranges from visual identity to underlying systems, and the more people know that, the more they can feel comfortable being a part of this intriguing, interesting, and ultimately inviting community.

Footnotes

  1. It doesn’t help that a lot of times when people refer to a graphic designer they actually mean a graphic/digital artist, but that’s a whole other rabbit hole to go down ↩

  2. Yes, emotion is technically a form of information, but not in the same way as data on how many tasks you’ve completed this month ↩