Design Is Not an Art Form

Confusing design for art is one of the worst mistakes a designer can make

Prateek Sharma
Springboard
Published in
5 min readMay 19, 2017

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There is an existential crisis at the heart of design. Conversations about “design” often end up sounding like conversations about “art.” Product managers and designers spend more time talking about color choices than they do about user needs.

This lopsided focus on aesthetics leads to the creation of products that are pretty, but ultimately unvaluable.

I learned this lesson the hard way while running my own travel startup. A couple of years into the company, I made my first design hire. We’d successfully launched a product but its visual appeal made me cringe. After a month of hard work with our new designer, I had consistent fonts, a great color palette, and balanced layouts. I was excited! I was sure this would increase user retention. You can probably guess what happened next.

Nothing.

It was as if nothing had changed. I had wasted precious startup time focusing on beauty for beauty’s sake, instead of working on what matters to users. Instead of design, I had created art.

Over time, I’ve realized that designers today identify more with other designers than their users. The approval they seek, often subconsciously, is that of their peers. They’ve internalized the world of Dribble and Behance to create products that all look alike. The art world can sustain inside jokes and sophisticated language only meant for insiders but that is a disaster in design. Design is not for designers. It’s for the user.

This has gotten me thinking about the key differences between art and design. In the examples below, I’ve used the creative processes of famous artists to illustrate the divergence of purpose between the two disciplines.

Design is about solving a problem, not self-expression (mostly!)

Van Gogh, when asked about his creative process, famously said, “I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.” For an artist, the biggest reason to create is often a desire to express an idea that they just can’t contain anymore. Art is rarely about a purpose. Art just is.

Design, not so much. We design because we are trying to solve a problem. All design thinking processes — the design sprint, the double diamond — start with an explicit focus on the problem. The best designers are really good at creating and following processes that eliminate their biases. Yes, there is space to express yourself and you should! But that should come after you have solved the problem.

Design is about the user and her world, not the creator

Wes Anderson’s films all share the same set of actors, similar cinematography techniques, and similar color palettes. There is so much of Wes in his movies that they look like him and he, in turn, looks like a character in his movies. His movies are a carriage for himself.

As a designer, you have to instead be really good at channeling the user. This happens when you gain deep empathy for her — her needs, desires, values, and constraints.

Design is about managing multiple stakeholders, not flying solo

Robert Pirsig, who passed away recently, wrote Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance over four years. He was a technical writer by profession, writing computer manuals all day long. To create time for this book, he wrote from 2am to 6am every night. It was a solitary pursuit but it was also a completely autonomous process where he had total control over his book.

As a designer, though, you are never alone. Design, to use a cliche, is a team sport. You work with engineering, product management, business, and support to bring products to market. You might love that delightful animation but the engineer might hate spending three weeks on getting the physics of that interaction right. While balancing these varied points of view is hard, it is also a great learning opportunity. It ultimately helps improve the robustness of design and improves chances of success.

Design is about making compromises

Lou Reed was an iconic musician, who didn’t sell a lot of albums, was often panned by critics, but ultimately didn’t compromise on his vision for his music. His influence, especially on musicians, was huge. Brian Eno once said that while the Velvet Underground only sold 30,000 copies, “Everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band”.

Designers, don’t be Lou Reed. You’re not a rock star, never mind what your boss just said. You make great products happen through great design, and that means a whole lot of compromises. Think hard about the cost of building a complex interaction and its value to the user. Is there a cheaper solution of getting close to the ideal? Can launching an unpolished version help you learn important lessons faster? Do you want to optimize for experience or revenue? And yes, while there is always the theoretical possibility of achieving both, what are you going to ship today? As a designer, you have to learn to make decisions which you don’t love. But all is not lost: Making compromises does not mean you have to sell your soul. You can maintain a design backlog. List all the compromises you have made and create time in the future to go back and fix these.

I want to be clear though: Design and art share a lot of techniques and concepts. But they have very different purposes, and are created through separate processes. We need both in our world.

Treating design as an art is ultimately doing it a disservice. Designing products to help users get to their goals is a very worthy cause. Don’t create art for your users, design for them!

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Published in Springboard

Advice and insights to stay current in an ever-changing economy.

Written by Prateek Sharma

Entrepreneur, Product guy, Father, Music fanatic, List-maker, Phoneographer, Writer, Dreamer, Coffee-snob, Experiences over Possessions.Ex-Makemytrip & mygola.

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