Never the artist
Design and art are the same thing, aren't they?
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 fan 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 associated with design can be helpful in the process of making one, but the core of their creation comes from an artistic place. That’s why I've always been perplexed by being given the job of creating a t-shirt just because I'm a designer. And I’m convinced that part of the problem is Photoshop—but we’ll get to that in a second.
First, 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 a piece of furniture that you get a sense of joy from every time you see it. Hell, even some marketing visuals for companies like Apple or Linear can be downright beautiful, but that's not inherent to the medium. You can meticulously create the best possible system of components for a design system 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 two different? How do you tell when something is art or design or both? It's really about sussing out what makes art, art, and what makes design, design.
The two 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 on the whole that's a pretty great thing, it has really muddied the waters on what being a designer can mean1.
Art, at least in my book, has one key component that makes it what it is: being expressive but not necessarily informative2. Oftentimes it's based solely on emotions, whether they be those of the artist or those being elicited 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 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: always trying to convey some sort of information to a viewer. Whether that's the time of an event, the price of a service, or what button is important on a page, design is 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 on Photoshop earlier, and I was only half joking. The proliferation of Photoshop enabled anyone to become both designer and artist, but it also caused people to lump them all together under a single banner. The label “Graphic Designer” became shorthand for all things design and digital artist, differences be damned, and it ended up feeding into the notion that just because you express your creativity with these tools you must be able to create art. More often than not, “graphic designer” really means graphic artist, but most people just don’t know the difference.
Just because you know how to use a tool like Photoshop or Illustrator, doesn’t mean you’re any good at making art, especially at a professional level. Yeah, as a designer I can craft polished interfaces that help navigate users through a website or an app, but I’m not going to be the best choice for creating the illustration of a person walking through a park that is used as part of a hero in that very same experience. That takes a different skillset that not every designer should be expected to have, just like creating UI and UX wouldn’t be something you’d ask a skilled illustrator to tackle.
Why does it matter?
I know all of this feels like I’m splitting hairs, and that there's plenty of crossover between these two worlds, but the distinction between them is important. As someone who comes from a more systems 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, good and bad exist on each end and some things just aren't good. And let’s be honest, in a professional setting good is the least you should be striving for. So being asked to make art when I am obviously not the best at it and have to struggle just to make something basic is not an inviting experience.
But the bigger reason this is important is that it shows how diverse design really is. For a lot of designers, both new and old, the definition of design has been arbitrarily narrowed to only include what is actually digital art. Yes, that display ad for an upcoming campaign is design, but so is creating and curating components in Figma as part of a design system. Design ranges from visual identity to underlying systems, and the more people know that, the more people can feel comfortable being a part of this intriguing, interesting, and ultimately inviting community.
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 for us to go down
Yes, emotion is technically a form of information, but you know what I mean