Never the artist

There's a common misconception that has always confused me. Whenever I tell someone that I'm a designer, they inevitably end up asking me if I can make them a t-shirt. Now as an avid music lover for most of my life, graphic tees hold a special place for me. They can be amazing pieces of art, but they're just that, art. Sure some of the skills of design can be helpful in the process of making one, but the core of the creation comes from an artistic place. So I've always been perplexed by being given the job of creating a t-shirt just because I'm a designer, and I think part of the problem is Photoshop.

Let's get one thing straight: I am not saying that design is never art. Design can be art, just look at any building that has left you in awe of its angles or piece of furniture that you get a sense of joy from every time you see it. Hell, even some marketing visuals 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 exactly something that's going to be on display at the MoMA.

But then what makes the difference? How do you tell when something is art or design or both? It's really about sussing out the definition of what makes art, art, and what makes design, design.

Sides of the coin

Art and design are like squares and rectangles--sometimes a design is both, but more often than not it's its own thing. 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 actually a pretty great thing, it's really muddied the waters on what being a designer can mean^[1].

Art, at least in my book, has one key component: it's expressive, not necessarily informative ^[2]. Oftentimes it's based solely on emotions, whether they be those of the artist or those being elected in the viewer. Sometimes it can even be both. In either case, 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, 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 a viewer. Whether that's the time of an even, the price of a service, or what button is important on a page, 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 has to be because there's a need to clearly communicate with 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 blamed all of this one Photoshop earlier, and really I was only half joking. The proliferation of Photoshop enabled anyone to because both designer and artist, but it also aided in further limiting people's definition of creativity. To many, many people, being creative means being an artist, and our world tends to perpetuate that idea.

The problem is that creativity goes well beyond art. Yes, you can expressive your creativity by writing a poem or shooting a piece of art noire. But you can also be creative by being super good at 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 so 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?

I know all of this is a bit nit-picky and that there's plenty of crossover between these two worlds, but the distinction between the two is important, no matter how vague it may feel. 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 by 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 am obviously not as good at it and have to struggle with it for way longer than I should, it's not an inviting experience.

We should strive to not only inform people of the differences between art and design, but also let them know of all the different things that can be considered design. 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 that know that, the more people can feel comfortable being a part of this intriguing, interesting, and ultimately inviting community.