Thoughts on Design
Thinking through what I think design is
One of the most exciting times in my life was when I learned how to use Photoshop. I was 11 or so. One day, in my free time—of which I had plenty of and still dream about—I stumbled upon a Photoshop tutorial video on YouTube. It was about using the Hue and Saturation tool to change a person’s eye color in a photo. The adjustment was straightforward, actually. But let me tell you:
It. blew. my. mind.
That video unlocked a torrent of experimentation
I began playing around with changing people’s nail colors. The first photo I remember manipulating was one my dad took of my little sister wading in a kiddie pool. I changed her eyes to a foreign-looking blue, and nails to an exciting pink.
Admittedly, I don’t remember how my parents reacted to the final product; all I know, looking back, was that it was positive. That spurred me to continue down the rabbit hole of YouTube tutorials, learning how to do all kinds of effects from strangers on the internet.
While that original picture is now lost to whatever happened to our family’s old PC, young Francis was bold enough to make several of his Photoshop experiments public. He—I—posted them on DeviantArt, of course, under the username Egrius.1
Most of the stuff I was making was based on a formula I unconsciously followed: Choose a word that sounded cool then make it look even cooler. Here are some of the byproducts of those early days of creative exploration:
I look at these fondly. But now that I’m older and teaching myself a new skill—product design—I started to wonder: Are the things I made considered “Designs”? What even is design?
Articulating design
You’d think that someone who’s been fiddling around with Photoshop since he was a boy would know what design is. But I have to admit that the knowledge is tacit and evolving. I know it when I see it, for sure, but explaining it? You got me there.
The low hanging fruit of definitions I could grasp is aesthetics: Design should look nice. It has to look appealing. Now, if you’ve ever been to any local government office, you know that isn’t true. I’m sure there are countless mugs and album art and edited photographs that have been designed, yes, but just don’t meet your taste. That’s OK.
That’s another reason why design can’t just be about aesthetics. It’s all so subjective. That mug you hated? That’s another person’s pride and joy. Their father was probably a famous mug designer and so they wished to follow in his footsteps. The hatred or disagreement of Design doesn’t invalidate it.
So what’s design’s definition? I think there are several components to it. It’s especially important to consider them because it could transform Design to Art—an entirely different idea that I’ll get to in a bit.
These are the components of design I’ve figured so far:
It solves a problem
It depends on the context
It depends on the intention
Let me go through it one by one.
1. Design solves problems
A creative way to solve problems. That means it has an objective to achieve. How well it hit that objective isn’t always guaranteed—but it’s a possible solution, nonetheless.
Take this problem, for example: We have an event but we don’t know how to publicize it. What should we do? An answer: a poster. Design.
(The Instagram algorithm showed me this ad for an event I was somehow a target audience of):
Why a poster? It’s a quick way to communicate essential information in one go: who’s performing, the nature of the event, the venue, the time, and what to expect.
Why is the poster like that? Because there’s an objective here to encourage people to attend, the poster’s gotta be eye-catching. Make it red, because that’s bright and associated with energy. We can’t just use text since visuals are quicker to digest, so let’s get the comedians to pose in a certain way.
How about the font? Arial is too simple. What is it, a corporate memo? Let’s use something Gothic, with spikes. Those are fonts with flourishes that often get associated with exciting places, like carnivals or local bars.
And on and on these conversations could go.
Could the same thought processes be considered in my past typographical works? Maybe not. I wasn’t really aiming to achieve anything there, except for something to look cool.
“But Francis,” you may murmur from the back of the audience, “wouldn’t looking cool also be a problem in need of a solution?” The problem: How do I make this text look cool? The solution: With these Photoshop features.
That’s where the second component comes in.
2. Design depends on context
What’s the context? Where am plugging it in? What’s beside it? What were the circumstances that squeezed the thing into existence? In a few years, people could look at the comedians’ event poster above outside its context and consider it as a valuable detail in the story of what made humans humans.
The context of my DeviantArt works was that I had recently discovered Photoshop and I wanted to copy things that looked cool. Nothing more. How the comedians’ poster came to be was likely because they needed marketing material to distribute online and encourage people to buy tickets. That’s design.
This section’s a lot shorter because it very quickly rubs elbows with the last component of design.
3. Design depends on intention
As an exercise in inversion, I think it would also help to define design by what it isn’t, which is art. Where design aims to solve a problem, art aims to express. Its destination is not a solution; it might not even have a destination. It’s more open to interpretation and, therefore, immune to failure.
Design can fail. Art can’t.
Failure in design is a push-only door that has a handle on its pushing side, causing people to pull like a fool (that’s been me too many times). It’s when people buy tickets to an event thinking it’s one day, when it’s actually on another.
“Failure” in art could be considered an alternate interpretation—maybe not what the creator was going for—but can still be valid. An example of this would be any work by Cy Twombly. I hate that guy, but I have to respect him. His works show a boldness and courage to make something and share it. I’ve got to admire that.
His intention was to express, and no one else really mattered. I don’t know where exactly he was going, but I wouldn’t consider him lost.
Design and art aren’t enemies
The boundaries between design and art aren’t strict and stark. It always depends.
Art has been the solution to many people’s problems; I’d even say it’s medicinal and necessary. Then there’s design. It’ll always be an expression of what the designer/s think is the best solution to a problem. It’s coated in ideas, experiences, skills, and personalities.
These definitions aren’t finished
Design and art are ocean-sized concepts that a teacup of an essay like mine can’t possibly hold. And a lot like oceans, they’re always changing (I think that’s how oceans work). People have been designing and art-ing long before I discovered Photoshop. It’ll continue to evolve, just as like my understanding.
Despite their differences, I think design and art are similarly worthwhile pursuits. Although they can differ sometimes, I think they’re always at their most powerful when they’re embraced at the same time.
As a boy entering his teenage years, I was captivated by the idea of “epic.” Not in the Illiad sort of sense, but in the “epic win” sort of sense that was popular on the internet in the early 2000s. So I scoured through the Wikipedia page of iconic figures in Greek mythology. Agrius was a giant, son of Gaia. I changed the A to an E and that was that.