Visual Arts With Question Mark and Writing Through It Would I Do the Things I Do

Spend any corporeality of time working amidst professional person designers and you learn that equating fine art with design is a surefire way to stir the pot and hear bold statements like:

• "Design is not fine art. Blueprint has to function."
• "Art is meant to provoke idea and emotions, but it doesn't solve issues."
• "Artists primarily work off instinct, whereas designers utilize a methodical, data-driven process."

Unfortunately, the designer vs. artist discussion often deteriorates into ranting and raving. Lines are drawn, battle flags are raised, and productive dialogue becomes incommunicable.

What'due south really going on here? Why take art and design been pitted against each other, and why are designers then determined that design cannot be art? These questions are the starting point for a thoughtful conversation betwixt Toptal designers Micah Bowers and Miklos Philips.

Bowers is a make designer and illustrator who believes that art encompasses many creative disciplines, design being one, and therefore design is art.

Philips, a UX designer and lead editor for the Toptal Design Blog, takes the position that art and design may intersect, only they are distinctly different fields.

With our contestants in the ring, information technology'south time for the debate to brainstorm. Gentlemen, touch on gloves and get to your corners.

Is Design Art?

Micah: Design is art. Art is pattern. No exceptions.

Let's be articulate—I'm enlightened of how unpopular my position is, especially among my design peers. I've been to talks, read books, spoken with colleagues, and taken classes determined to plant the irreconcilable differences betwixt art and pattern. Whenever I share my views, the backfire comes quick and fierce, but I remain unmoved past the counter-arguments (good luck, Miklos).

The insistence on a distinction between fine art and design has been similar a constant, depression-grade fever that's bothered me for the last 15 years—commencement through my industrial pattern training, so during a fine arts graduate degree, and on into my career in branding and illustration.

My position is this: Nifty blueprint is kickoff and foremost art. What is this belief rooted in? A philosophical understanding of art.

Philosophers like Plato accept debated the meaning of fine art and the definition of design for centuries.
("Plato" by lentina_x - licensed under CC BY-NC-SA ii.0)

The quest to define fine art is steeped in centuries of contend. Greek philosopher Plato believed that fine art is substantially a reflection of a reflection of what is real. But his views are widely contested, and since nosotros have to outset somewhere, we must aim for an understanding that acknowledges history and the diversity of global thought and civilisation.

Paraphrasing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy leads us here:

Fine art exists and has existed in every known human culture and consists of objects, performances, and experiences that are intentionally endowed by their makers with a high caste of artful interest.

Past virtue of this definition, pattern is undeniably art. Information technology tin can be found in every human culture. It is used to create objects, performances, and experiences. And, designers intentionally instill significant amounts of aesthetic involvement into their piece of work.

Here, the inevitable cry is heard, "Look! You've undone yourself by a unmarried word. Aesthetic!"

Designers love to make sweeping assumptions in regard to aesthetics, so allow me to construct a safeguard.

Much like fine art, the concept of aesthetics is a complicated field of philosophical thought and cannot be reduced to the designer stereotype that it means "making things expect pretty."

In fact, aesthetics covers many questions that are essential to the "art vs. pattern" debate:

• "Is it possible to determine an aesthetic judgment from a practical one?"
• "What is the basis by which we judge between utility and beauty?"
• And, "How are the foundational beliefs by which nosotros brand aesthetic judgments influenced by time, culture, and life experience?"

Hither's my point: In the world of gimmicky design, art has been narrowly defined and unfairly diminished into a pathetic, watercolor caricature. Designers have flippantly inflated the significance of their own disciplines (which vary in substance to a comical caste) over centuries of artistic exercise, philosophical inquiry, and cultural agreement. Blueprint is art. Art is design. No exceptions.

Miklos: Design needs to fulfill a function. Not fine art.

First of all, we have to split out what type of design we're talking near. I tin can see in the instance of graphic design, analogy, and branding maybe design is somewhat "art," but if we're talking about more than functional design—such as digital product design or industrial design—we need to get a lot deeper, and it becomes clear: Design is non "art."

Keen design is office science, office process, and function a practical fix of solutions with a dash of aesthetics thrown in. Going across the surface, a designer inevitably discovers that groovy pattern is more than about delivering solutions to problems.

Design is a procedure, not art.

Every bit a UX designer, I e'er need to dig deeper, across the facade that i might call a potential "blueprint" and look at the bigger flick holistically: the target audience, the use instance scenarios, the context, and the device the pattern is intended for: Boob tube to mobile, desktops to tablets, to ATMs, etc. And when it comes to product design, allow's non forget validation and usability testing. If design were only art, how could you test it?

If design were purely about art, what about usability heuristics? Are such UX usability concepts as feedback, consistency and standards, error prevention, user command, flexibility, and predictability out the window? Isn't design at that place to serve people? If you desire to be an artist, be that, but don't phone call yourself a designer. Exist a painter or a sculptor.

"At that place is beauty when something works and it works intuitively," says Jonathan Ive.

The "working intuitively" part alone tin can't exist achieved by "fine art"; it'southward driven past user research and testing. Expert pattern is too information-driven. What is more, in the near time to come, AI will transform the way design is delivered. It volition exist super-personalized and anticipatory. Volition blueprint as "art" be able to do that? I don't think so.

Y'all can't say designing a ticket vending machine UI is "art." Surely, aesthetics and emotional blueprint come into play—as other articles on the Toptal Blueprint Blog accept mentioned before—because aesthetics play a role in blueprint to the extent that designs with better aesthetics make a product seem to "piece of work improve." Just all the same, the function of the blueprint and context of utilise demand to exist taken into business relationship.

For case, in Don Norman's seminal book "The Design of Everyday Things," he talks about blueprint and the concept of affordances. (The concept of an affordance was coined by the perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson in his groundbreaking book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.) Norman writes:

Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Handles are for lifting. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to exercise just by looking: no motion-picture show, label, or teaching needed.

And then, affordances are "perceived properties" of a role in pattern, and they need to be signaled to the user with "signifiers," which provide clues to the user of the existence of a possible interaction. I don't know how one would go nigh marrying the concepts of affordances and signifiers with "art." They are essential interaction pattern concepts in the realm of HCI (human-reckoner interaction). They take zip to do with art.

As a UX designer, I pass up the notion. I mean, can you imagine a ticket vending machine designed in the cubist style past Picasso? Not saying it wouldn't be interesting, just information technology wouldn't exist very effective or functional.

What Is Skilful Blueprint?

Micah: Art solves problems. "Good blueprint" is but i path to a solution.

A ticket vending machine in Picasso's Cubism? At present that would be adept design! I can envision the hands of a capable artist leveraging Cubism'southward stylistic dissonance into a clearly defined visual hierarchy that delights users with unambiguous points of interaction. Finally, we could moving ridge good day to the banal and confusing push shrines we've all grown accepted to.

Interestingly, such an idea is not without precedent. In towns and cities around the world, public art installations have been used to better experiences previously overlooked or muddled by design. The Van Gogh Path, created by Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde, is a perfect example.

The technology of experimental installation art has a substantial touch on on the earth of design.

Inspired by Van Gogh's Starry Night, the path runs through Nuenen, NL (a town where the creative person lived in the 1880's) and is made upward of thousands of small painted rocks that capture energy from the sun during the day and low-cal up at night.

If this were all the project encompassed, it would be lilliputian more than than a nice lighting effect, but the scope of Roosegaarde's creative vision is much wider. Van Gogh Path is a proof of concept within a larger projection called SMART HIGHWAY, an ambitious attempt aimed at reinventing the Dutch landscape past implementing a sustainable organization of glowing, interactive roads.

The takeaway? Art and artists have the ability to solve substantial issues.

Problem solving requires knowledge, experience, skill, inquiry, risk, and an agreement of human being behavior, just unfortunately, many designers neglect to acknowledge that artists employ problem-solving methodology in their work—even though artists take been systematically pursuing artistic solutions for centuries, long earlier the distinction of "designer" was fashionable.

Demand proof?

Again, we look to a Dutch artist, the master of light and painter of the Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer lived during the middle part of the 17th century, experienced modest success every bit a painter, and died nether a mount of debt. About ii centuries after his death, however, Vermeer's piece of work was rediscovered, and his continuing as one of the great painters of all time was cemented in the register of art history.

Only a strange thing happened. The more people studied Vermeer and his piece of work, the more they realized that his paintings and process were truly unlike whatever other artist's. How and so?

• Vermeer had no formal creative preparation and plain did not undergo an apprenticeship as a painter.
• His torso of piece of work is quite pocket-size, consisting of less than 50 full paintings.
• He never had whatsoever pupils or apprentices of his own.
• Nearly all of Vermeer'southward paintings were staged in one of 2 rooms in his home.
• There are no surviving preparatory drawings or sketches attributed to Vermeer.
• X-rays of Vermeer's paintings reveal no underdrawings or compositional corrections.
• His paintings contain lighting and perspective distortions that can only exist seen through manmade lenses.
• And finally, Vermeer was a shut friend of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch scientist known for his trailblazing work in the fields of lens making and microscopy.

Some scholars contest that the human being center cannot naturally perceive the lighting and perspective aberrations plant in Vermeer's paintings.

What does all this mean? Vermeer likely used an advanced, and still unknown, form of photographic camera obscura to create his masterpieces. This is a contentious theory, but there is ample show from multiple sources to support such a claim.

How is it relevant to our debate? Vermeer invented an apparatus and process that went undetected and unduplicated for over 350 years and allowed him to create some of the world's most iconic and technically exquisite paintings without any formal training. That is the pinnacle of problem solving.

Design is an art form, a method of human expression that follows a system of highly developed procedures in order to imbue objects, performances, and experiences with significance. Like all art forms, design has the potential to solve problems, but there is no guarantee that it will.

More than anything, I desire designers to realize that art is non an asinine subculture of design rejects preoccupied with finger painting their feelings. In fact, a low view of art is also a low view of blueprint, science, history, and culture that severely limits artistic potential and interdisciplinary progress.

At the finish of the 24-hour interval, fine art solves problems. "Adept design" is simply one path to a solution.

Miklos: Proficient design is unbiased and delivers what people need.

Discover I didn't say "what people want" like the Rolling Stones vocal that says: "You can't always get what you want…y'all go what you demand." People don't always know what they want, it's upward to designers to effigy out exactly what they need.

By the way, how are paintings solving problems? I fail to see that.

Skillful design is subjective to a degree, just in my view "good design" is figured out along the style in an iterative design process with lots of validation/testing. Information technology's "pattern thinking." Information technology's been around for decades. It's something that merely works, where things come together in the right way, at the right fourth dimension, in the right moment.

Good design is definitely not about fine art or aesthetics alone. That is just the surface. Practiced blueprint should be judged by several factors such as the intended user base, the environment, context of use, the medium, and the device it's to appear on. For example, in the case of a ticket vending car, aesthetics may non thing as much—people need to go things done and things just need to work for them. It needs to be super functional, fast, and efficient.

Practiced blueprint in my mind is a design that is balanced in the right mode between aesthetics and interaction design. To go on using the example of a ticket vending auto, in that scenario, the "look" is less important and should take the appropriate portion in terms of importance on the balancing scale, and usability and interaction design (functional design) should have the larger proportion.

We could too contrast "proficient blueprint" vs. "bad design." Bad pattern is pandemonium. It is disorder. It tin be frustrating or annoying. It slows people downwardly and drains them emotionally. Information technology may actually be ugly, or simply unremarkable and therefore non worthy of anyone's attending. To your audition, bad blueprint is an impediment instead of an empowerment.

Looks kind of cool, but is it good design?

Is Blueprint Subjective or Objective?

Miklos: It'southward a mix of both in varying proportions.

Art and design are inextricably combined. I consider blueprint equally a holistic effort which includes "art." Design is both subjective and objective but should be primarily objective. Proper design objectivity is achieved past user inquiry (defining the target user base of operations, getting to know the product's users, observing context of use), working through the essential steps of a user-centered pattern procedure (UCD) and user testing.

A design can spring from a brilliant designer'south mind, but its practical utilise even so needs to be validated. If design were but subjective, there would be no demand for usability testing (which would nearly probable upset the designer because he/she would find that the design doesn't piece of work). The design would come from ane person which, to me, is a ridiculous, backward idea. Designers who are 100% subjective are arrogant.

However, a small-scale per centum of subjectivity does come into play—aesthetics play a role, and this is perhaps where emotional design happens. This is the step where the designer's sensibility, "art," and subjectivity is brought to the forefront. Great designers "dress up" or "put a facade" on the underlying functional blueprint to create something that works on all emotional levels—visceral, behavioral, and reflective—to evangelize a product with astonishing UX.

Some designers believe adept design must exist objective. I don't believe that. There is a touch of genius in Starck'southward or Jonathan Ive's designs. They bring a dash of subjectivity to their designs which has to do with taste. One of Steve Jobs'southward greatest insults was to accuse someone of having no taste.

Chair design by Belgian designer Maarten Van Severen

Micah: Fine art and all its disciplines (blueprint included) combine objectivity and subjectivity.

I'one thousand non sure how it happened, Miklos, merely it looks like we've found some sort of common ground, and I'm pleasantly surprised.

Art and all its disciplines, including design, require a mix of objectivity and subjectivity. Of course, there will be designers who roll their eyes and declare, "Art is purely subjective. It can mean different things to dissimilar people." The obvious counterpoint? "Same with design!"

Merely let'south expect closer.

When designers assert that art has to exist subjective, they're typically referring to the manner people estimate the outcome of an artist's efforts. This manner of thinking about art places a supreme emphasis on results. In other words, art equals objects, performances, and experiences. Art is a painting. Art is a dance. Art is a low-cal prove.

Viewed this way, art is subjective. I call up American Gothic is creepy, just you find it inspiring. I think an Eames Chair is classy, but y'all feel it's kitschy. I think the WhatsApp interface is disruptive, but y'all've never seen anything more than elegant. Fine art is a event, results are open to interpretation, and everyone's right!

Is it fair to judge art solely by the result of an artist'southward efforts?

Luckily, the definition of art that I proposed at the start of this debate is more nuanced, so let's refresh our memories:

Art exists and has existed in every known human culture and consists of objects, performances, and experiences that are intentionally endowed by their makers with a high caste of aesthetic interest.

Notice the words in bold. Artists "intentionally endow" their work with meaning to a high caste. In other words, they consciously enhance or purposefully enrich. There is intent married to action.

Understood more fully, art is not a result. Art is a procedure, and the process of fine art is alluvion with objectivity.

Don't agree? Consider the centuries of repeatable practices, standardized tools, chemical reactions, and scientific discoveries owed to art. To the extent that there tin can exist realities independent of the mind (the definition of objectivity), fine art is objective because it is process dependent.

If a ceramic artist fires a dish without get-go letting it dry, it will explode.

If a pianist places her fingers on the correct keys, she will play the intended chord.

If a web designer selects Dingbats for torso text, large portions of his customer'southward site will be illegible.

The large takeaway, Miklos, is that I generally concur with you lot. Art, and thereby design, is a mixed bag of objectivity and subjectivity sprinkled with enough ambiguity to proceed this Fine art vs. Design argue raging on for years to come up.

Conclusion

It is non at all articulate that these words—'What is art?'—limited anything similar a unmarried question, to which competing answers are given, or whether philosophers proposing answers are even engaged in the same fence… The sheer diversity of proposed definitions should give us pause. – Kendall Walton

At their most fundamental level, both art and design seek to communicate something, and any the differences, or whether classified as fine, commercial, or practical art—at their best, both forms elicit an emotional response.

It has been argued that the difference between fine and applied art is context and has more to do with value judgments made about the work itself than any indisputable distinction between the two disciplines. Furthermore, comparison "fine art" and "pattern" is, though a lofty endeavor, perchance a quixotic ane, as neither can be defined absolutely because they are ever changing—boundaries are constantly being pushed and will hopefully proceed to be then into the future. This debate, later on all, is timeless.

How do we decide what is fine art and what is blueprint, and why is the relationship between the two and so fractured? Is it the difference between what is functional (design) and what is not-functional (art) that creates the dissension? Is a Noguchi coffee table or a Rennie Mackintosh chair merely a functional object, or is it art that happens to accept a part?

Glaswegian architect, creative person, and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh was one of the first proponents of integrated art-architecture. He believed in the pure integration of class and function and sought throughout his career to bring forward the theory of "the room as a work of art."

Rennie Mackintosh designed the furniture and other fixtures in his buildings, where every detail contributed to a greater whole.

Frank Lloyd Wright believed so strongly in the unity of form and part that he changed the ofttimes-misunderstood axiom, "form follows role" coined by his mentor Louis Sullivan to read, "class and office are one." His program for the Guggenheim "…was to make the building and the paintings a beautiful symphony such as never existed in the world of Art earlier."

In conclusion, information technology is not art versus design, simply the unity of the two that is at the core of any superior blueprint. In other words, practiced design incorporates art.

• • •

Farther reading on the Toptal Design Web log:

• eCommerce UX – An Overview of Best Practices (with Infographic)
• The Importance of Human-Centered Pattern in Product Design
• The All-time UX Designer Portfolios – Inspiring Case Studies and Examples
• Heuristic Principles for Mobile Interfaces
• Anticipatory Design: How to Create Magical User Experiences

glynnuntentoody.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.toptal.com/designers/creative-direction/art-vs-design