Relative Sanity

Let’s get one thing straight. I like art. I love hanging around in galleries, and I love being challenged by creative and novel output.

One of my favourite places to visit in Glasgow when I was a teen was the Gallery of Modern Art, which I’m actually rather depressed about not having a website of its own. Maybe I should drop them an email…

Anyway, the point of this article isn’t to eviscerate art. It’s to eviscerate artists who pretend that they’re designers.

You heard me right. Eviscerate.

Design and art are creative. They require time, talent, an eye for aesthetic, for balance, and an understanding of the audience. They both generally exist to convey a message, and are both judged on their ability to convey that message.

But they’re completely different.

I said recently that, if there is some part of your “design” that I can’t argue with, then it’s not “design”, it’s art. I mean to expand on that a little.

But is it art?

Art is design minus accountability. it’s as simple as that. If your work answers only to you, to your muse, your whim, your own direction, then it’s art.

Design has much more of a load to bear. Design is directed creativity, where that direction comes from outside the creator. It’s art that you have to justify, and you have to justify with reason, not just with “but I like that bit”.

This reminds me of some advice I was given at school by one of my English teachers. She said, quite simply, “Kill your darlings”. This was in reference to short stories and essays, to creative work and also to critical work. I took the advice and my grades soared, but it took me a while to understand why.

Your overconfidence is your weakness

The weakest parts of your work are the bits you love. Having an emotional attachment to your work is fine. The bits that you “love“, though, are the bits you’ve lost the ability to be rational about. They’re the bits you’ll defend, the bits that, when the client hates them, will cause you to get offended and become bitter.

They’re the bits that stop you from being a designer.

Every designer’s job is to answer questions. The client asks us to achieve something, and we have to answer. How we respond is where we get to be creative, but if our work doesn’t answer the questions, we’ve failed, regardless of how beautiful it is.

So, every part of your design work must be open to challenge, to interrogation. If you’re unwilling to throw any part of your work out (given, of course, a cogent argument compelling you to do so), then you’re not designing. You’re painting, you’re putting your pleasure above your client’s, and you’re failing as a designer.

There’s a little bit of the darkness inside us all

I’m not saying this from an ivory tower. I’m saying this having produced work that falls into this category, both graphic design and code. I’ve been proud of things that have no place in designs, have no place in the medium I’ve chosen, and have been devastated when they’ve been (rightly) rejected.

I’m aware of my limitations as a designer, and would never call myself one. I play at design, I don’t work at it, and if challenged, I’d rather employ a designer than produce my own work.

What galls me is when designers don’t understand their own limitations, and produce work with no understanding of the questions being asked, no appreciation of the “why”. This is disappointing, frustrating and dangerous.

Wait, “dangerous”?

Yes, dangerous. Dangerous to my time and their health.

All web developers have, at one time or another, received artwork produced by “designers” with no understanding of the medium. The work has never been given any consideration other than “something pretty I once saw on a flash website”, and provides no direction on user interaction, accessibility, or anything else that constitutes what “works” on the web.

It would be like me calling myself a graphic designer, then producing some animation for the billboard poster I was commissioned to create.

This isn’t design. This isn’t useful. It’s masturbation, and it must stop.

Okay, calm down

Phew. What’s the real problem, here? The real problem is usually one of a “designer” being pulled out of their ability zone. I touched on this in From the gut:

Suddenly, I’m a sales and business development advisor, and friends, I suck at sales and business development.

To couch that in this context, in that situation I’m suddenly a business development artist. I’m saying or doing things that feel right, but which may or may not have any basis in reality.

Such is the fate of the graphic designer who says—or who is volunteered into saying—that they can produce web design.

The thinking is usually “I can draw pictures—how hard can it be?”.

If you agree with that, ask yourself if you’d be happy employing a cashier as your accountant. They “work with numbers”, so how hard can it be?

The tax man tends to frown on “artistic” accountancy.

So you’re saying that design is hard, art is easy?

Not at all—I’m saying they’re utterly different beasts, and to ignore that is to diminish both.

I said before that art was design without the accountability, implying that art is design where the only person you have to please is yourself. That’s true, but if you think that makes it easier, ask yourself how easy, quick and painless your last blog redesign was, or how far through that novel you are.

Art is hard. Art is very hard, because everyone’s toughest audience is themselves.

Design is easy: all we have to do is what the client asks. Regardless of how much better it would look if we could ignore the constraints of the medium.