questions

Is design art?
Is art design?
Is everything art?
If everything is art, then nothing is art so does art have value?

Does everything communicate?
Can you communicate alone?


And here I'm hoping these words will communicate. Can we communicate? If you need someone else to communicate and you cannot be sure how the words/ideas will be interpreted by the other person(s) are you really communicating?

What are your answers?

Some interesting and partially philosophical questions there.

Design & Art can only be one of them, but also both. That`s something that depends how you differentiate design/art.

I`m definitely sure not everything is art, but that is only my sole opinion based on what I feel is art and what is design. How I distinguish them could be different for every other person out there and I`m sure it is.

Art resembles the inner feelings visualized on the canvas of your choice. What you do in your process of creating art is solely based on yourself. Feelings, mood, what you want to communicate, and so on.

Design always has a purpose, or shall I say "it should have one". You are not selfish in designing, you create something for an audience not based on mood and whatnot, but on experience, surveys, user testing, and more of those more scientific approaches. Design is a science in itself.

As I differentiate beetween art and design it`s clear that for me not everything is art. Many things are art and there is more art around us than we perceive most of the time.

Everything communicates, humans, animals, even objects do communicate. It hasn´t to be words, at the basis everything communicates it`s use. Take a simple handsized stone or a wooden stick. I`m sure you know what you can possible do with it. Communication doesn´t need to be direct. That stone has no 527 pages instruction-book next to it, but the stone is communicating through your mind.

You can communicate alone, definitely. Inner-dialogue, reflection, take different stances and compare them, self-analysis, and way more, you name them.

May I add a question? Does art stop beeing art when you start designing it?
(for example: creating art for a fixed audience)
For me there`s a big bold Yes

First of all thankyou both for your replies! And most of the questions are indeed philosphical; communication is a big part of philosophy.

Scrivs: I don't have any answers, as soon as I think I'm onto something more questions will rise and I begin to doubt.

Art for example; Art as the expression of emotion is to narrow of a definition I think. Sure the creator will probably have experienced an emotion while creating his work but it does not necessarily has to be an expression of that emotion or any emotion whatsoever.

Defining art as everything is probably to broad, except from the problems with art being nothing and having no value as a word there is also the problem with things we have never experienced. Can we call things we have never experienced art? I think it's a bit skewed to define things we don't know anything about. But on the other hand, art is something of a definition which keeps expanding, what we call art nowadays wasn't art 200 years ago so maybe everything will eventually become art in the future.

I really don't know. Can we even define anything? Can we define what a chair is? Which is kinda weird cause most people would instantly recognise a chair.

Does art stop being art when you start designing it? Can art stop being art? Sorry!

I have to think about this.

Utilitarians think that design is engineering.

Hedonists think that design is art.

Egoists are right about design.

We had this discussion a ton of times in art school. After a quarter of papers, discussions, and projects... census was:

Art is expression. Design is communication.

You can decorate and make a beautiful design, but if it doesn't convey the correct message, it fails.

With Art, the only client you have to answer to is yourself. With design, you have to answer to many.

I have to agree with AndyinColor that Design boils down to communication (communication to many) and solving a problem. Art is more often an expression of a singular point of view of the artist. If that art "communicates" to a broader audience that's great but that communication is often left open for interpretation. IMHO, I don't think that design is really meant for open interpretation.

I'm still collecting my thoughts, but I did think that in regards to MentalFlood's comment that

"Art resembles the inner feelings visualized on the canvas of your choice. What you do in your process of creating art is solely based on yourself. Feelings, mood, what you want to communicate, and so on."

that this represents a specific art theory which is best associated with Expressionism and works from groups like der blaue reiter or Vincent Van Gogh, but it doesn't really jive with Modernist thought or formalist theory such as is found in the work of artists like Mondrian, Malevich or Cezanne.

The Formalists would not consider their works to regard their own personal feeling and in fact, make work based on precision and specific structures. Their goal also is generally to serve/connect and communicate with humanity at large rather than to create a piece that represents their own thought/feelings as disconnected from society.

I also think most artists would object to the idea that a difference between design and art is that "design has a purpose." The vast majority of artwork has a strong agenda, a strong desire to communicate, a purpose and intent behind it's creation and a message for its audience.

The creation based on science/polls and user testing though does perhaps start to get at a distinction.

There's various arts and differents players. Web designer have the dirty job to do. They get the delirants ideas from graphists with a lot of marvelous creations, well that's art, so to say. And you have to put that stuff integring the marvellous data you grab from the programmer with a lot of marvelous functions and data more or less structured.

Though, is design an art, yes, indeed. The art of finding solution to mange boths sides, To understand how-to use data in an ergonomic and usable way, with all the browsers, and simplifying presentation code to be readable, efficient and reworkable.

It's the work others doesn't want to do, even if programmers gives you a lot of parametrization to adapt data, or some templating system. And graphists can make a little effort to imagine an internet page as it is and not a Photoshop frame or a paint paper on the tables, thinking more of graphical ideas not of paint brushes or pens.

Yes it's an art as both the other will say you've done a bad job, and their masterpiece is deserved by your bad work. In fact it's the really hard job. As a programmer, I swear over this part of the job, which needs a lot of achievement to get real nice looking results, w/o hiding the most important thing of the site : the content.

And more terrible, as a clothes creator (well the needle part), your design can be changed in a wisper by another designer, or even worst by the user changing the template of the site "because it's more readable", mécreants !!! ;)

I guess this post is somewhat relevant.

I still stand by what I said there. To me art is just a subset of design.

However, I will clarify what I meant by the "design of expression". I do not intend to imply that it is limited to just personal/emotional expression but also includes the expression of an idea or the expression of a culture and/or time/experience... though upon reflection I am not comfortable with that definition.

Another way to look at it would be to take a traditional stance on it, defining art as craft done with exceptional skill, which I somewhat agree with; that definition was largely blown up by Modernism, perhaps its time to start using it again.

If we accept that art is craft done with exception skill then anything created/crafted could be defined as art be it a sentence, code, a visual method of communication or even an action (surgery/economics). With this definition, art is still a subset of design (if we are to accept everything is designed), a way of labelling certain designs as exceptional.

Edit: Unrelated, but I do not remember giving a star to anything/anyone. Hmm.

Edit #2: Upon further thought, why are we even bothering to ponder this? It is simply an argument of definitions. While I know that being able to define something is fundamental to being able to communicate, a label (which is what we are trying to define) is really not that important in terms of the result. If it works as a website, it works as a website, be it design or art; it will be whatever someone wants to label it.

Why can not something just be a website? Why does it have to be a design or art? It is neither of those, it is a website (however, I would say that it is the result of a process of design, it has been designed, just as is everything else has).

this represents a specific art theory which is best associated with Expressionism and works from groups like der blaue reiter or Vincent Van Gogh

Agreed. And you can throw the Abstract Expressionists in there as well: Pollock, de Kooning, etc.

I like a quote I found from John Maeda (paraphrased here) that was something along the lines of: Art asks questions. Design solves questions.

I think art is design, but not all design is art. An artist is a designer (maybe not a Graphic Designer or Web Designer), but designer's don't have to be artists.

I think that we are dealing with two definitions of art here. When people say things like "the art pinball" they are really misusing the word. Instead they should use "artform", as in "pinball is an artform".

Artform according to Britanica:

1: a form or medium of expression recognized as fine art (sees dance as both an art form and an entertainment) 2 a: an unconventional form or medium in which impulses regarded as artistic may be expressed b: an undertaking or activity enhanced by a high level of skill or refinement (easy conversation‘

Can we really define anything? I think not, in the end you can only define in words, which itself need to be defined again which is an endless process. It's chaos out there.

Just semantics.

Why define them, why not just do what you do, stop trying to fit in a box and define everything and just do it.

If you have the Sistine Chapel on one end of a spectrum, and the print pattern on store brand napkins on the other, you have a rough tool to measure whether or not something is art. Clear Michelangelo and a napkin print designer are not in the same league, nor are they solving the same problem.

Reading articles aloud from the encyclopedia is not the same as reciting poetry, in their expected forms. You could do a crazy dramatic reading of the encyclopedia article contrasted with an intentionally droll and arrhythmical reading of a sonnet. Then what?

Same for art and design. Art, in the most generic sense, comes from an emotional, social, or internal aspect of a person and does not have to be created for any other means than the inspiration of the artist. Design on the other hand is usually primarily concerned with solving a problem. If you remove the problem-solving aspect at the root of a particular design, you end up with something you might have to re-categorize as art.

I think trying to come up with a golden rule on how to categorize everything would be impossible, but I think establishing a few principles makes it easier know what we are looking at. There is a spectrum, a continuum, and there is no exact place to place any particular item. But if we broadly applied a consistent principle in attempting to categorize art and design items, we'd see general trends, at least on the items that are clearly more on one end than the other. Again, Rembrandt vs movie ticket stub would be at opposite ends.

I think following that model and categorizing 1000 random art or design items would yield something like a reverse bell curve: high on both ends and low in the middle. That ambiguous area is interesting.

On principle, I will add, that we don't as a culture want to just give up trying to define things. The attempt at definition needs to remain in constant tension while at the same time avoiding polarization: opt for the via media and let successive generations reveal the "truth". On that note, much of what is foisted on the public as art today won't be well-looked upon in the future, especially as we see a nascent rebirth of traditional (objective and definable) fine art. It's almost funny that graphic design doesn't suffer from problems of categorization.

For instance, nobody sees a complex Photoshop piece and says "my kid could do that", because they know they simply can't. The skill involved in design is clear. But when you see a piece of art your kid really could have done, because it lacks skill of any sort other than being a concept, I think the average joe that thinks that is on to something.

We'll see!

.

Design can fail objectively, art can't

Art is surrounded by interpretation and takes on different meanings depending on who's looking at/listening to/interacting with it.

If a design doesn't work, then the design doesn't work, and it's clear to most people.

That's my thoughts anyway

Sorry about the double post. My connection is not the greatest.

Art is expression. Design is communication.

You can decorate and make a beautiful design, but if it doesn't convey the correct message, it fails.

I agree with this entirely.

I personally do not like art, but I love design.

Just semantics.

Why define them, why not just do what you do, stop trying to fit in a box and define everything and just do it.

I agree with you about the definitions, I don't think it's possible to define words with words. But to just do and not categorize also seems impossible, we as humans always categorize the input we get from our senses. Atleast on the most basic level the distinction between dangerous and not dangerous.

I was thinking a bit more about this today, and I was starting to think that maybe the problem with comparing Design and Art is that they are not the same type of thing.

The best analogy I could come up with for the comparison between Art and Design was trying to compare a campfire to combustion. One is an end result, and the other is a process.

Combustion doesn't always end in a camp fire, you might get the flames from a stove, or a fireplace. Both of which share some properties with a campfire, because of the way combustion works. A campfire always needs combustion to be successful.

Design doesn't always end in art, you might get a process, or an interface. Both of which share some properties with art, because of the way design works. Art almost always needs design to be successful.

In the end Art vs. Design is not a workable comparison. It's not even like comparing apples and oranges, it's like comparing apples and the reproductive process of trees.

Very valid point there Cyborg.

The definition 'design is communication' only holds up for some areas.

If I design a plane to fly faster or a building to withstand earthquakes, wheres the communication in that?

@Lewis:

Then design is even harder to define.

@Cyborg:

I do like where you are going, not to sure if it's impossible to compare art and design though. The term design is also often (maybe wrongly) used as an end result. And art can also be about the process, which makes the process the end result?

I do like where you are going, not to sure if it's impossible to compare art and design though. The term design is also often (maybe wrongly) used as an end result. And art can also be about the process, which makes the process the end result?

@Willem:

This is sort of what I was trying to get at, the way the two intermingle, they're not separate things, and thus very hard to compare.

If you're referring to a design as an end result, you're using it as a generic term. "A design" can refer to a piece of art, an interface, blueprints, some engineering, a building, etc.

The "end" should probably have been dropped from "end result" in my whole argument. With "Art about the process" there is still a process that results in art. It just constantly results in art while it runs, just like playing a game results in fun. You don't play the whole game, and then at the end suddenly have fun, you have fun the whole time.

Design (verb) is a component of art, which is a subcategory of design (noun). I really don't see how the two can be separated enough to make any kind of meaningful comparison.

The google cache of this page is week old, so I guess most of the discussion here is lost... so where were we?

Willem had just pointed out that seeing if art fell into the category of design was, in fact, the comparison we were going for. He also question how a group can be created if, by what I said, we can only add something to a group by comparing it to other things already in the group.

I rebutted that I said you had to compare something to the other members in the group when adding to the group, and that creating a group was a different case, and i that case you'd just be comparing things to each other without the group. I then went on to offer the somewhat tautological sounding definition of what goes into the category of design as: A Design(category/result) is something that has design(process) as part of it's process.

So I then suggested that we needed a way to figure out if art includes design(process) in it's process. I'm not sure if Willem replied to that or not.

I was going to say that I think design is part of art, but art isn't a subset of design. If we are looking at the definition of art to contain beauty then that would mean all design is beautiful if it were a subset of that. However, I'm going with the notion that if something is a subset of another then that means it only has some of its trait and since not all design has beauty it only takes on the aspects of art that it fits, namely the process.

All art is a problem solving process, although the problem isn't readily apparent. You are simply trying to represent an image from your mind physically.

Man this is getting too deep for me, I might have to bail on it.

However, I'm going with the notion that if something is a subset of another then that means it only has some of its trait and since not all design has beauty it only takes on the aspects of art that it fits, namely the process.

Subcategory, not Subset. I guess what I was really trying to say is that you can file art under design because it has the right properties to be a type of design.

For example, Music is a subcategory of art, but not all art involves sound.

And not all design is beautiful, but all art is meant to be.

@Scrivens - I think to label art as being beautiful depends entirely what your definition of beauty is. By my own definitions, it seems right, beauty being the product of perfect function and art being the exceptional anything but I am sure my definitions differ vastly from most; I think the modern definition/interpretation of beauty is largely without value.

I do not agree with the idea that art has to be beautiful means that it can not be a subset/subcategory of design.

However, as some food for thought, are One and Three Chairs and An Oak Tree beautiful? Do you think their creators aimed to create something beautiful? Would you even say that they are works of art?

And on the idea that not all design is beautiful, I would say that all good design is beautiful. Then again, this depends on your definition of beauty, what makes a design good and the perspective you take on things. Arguably everything is beautiful, good design and functioning perfectly from an objective point of view; it is only when subjective opinions are in the mix that everything gets a bit blurred and uncertain.

Architectural design is a type of design, but not all design involves buildings.

Interface design is a type of design, but not all design involves buttons.

Making a racecourse is a type of design, but not all design is driven on at excessive speeds.

But art can't be a type of design because not all design has to be beautiful? If all design had to have the properties of every type of design, things would get unwieldy fast.