Life of Designer
Is designing an art? Well yes, and it goes beyond that. Art is a creative expression, an emotion, it is about creating something that may not necessarily serve a functional purpose.
Design is a skill, and a lot more. It’s a platform, a medium to communicate. It is focused, designers solve problems and meet objectives. It is about functionality, usability and effectiveness. It involves users, their needs, business goals and technology too.
“Good design is innovative. Good design must be useful. Good design is aesthetic design. Good design makes a product understandable. Good design is honest. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is long-lasting. Good design is consistent in every detail. Good design is environmentally friendly. And last but not least, good design is as little design as possible.”
― Dieter Rams
While art has all the freedom to express and emote, designers work with constraints and specific goals. It is iterative, research based and requirement specific. A designer’s life is a constant balancing act between artistic intuition and strategic thinking. A creative mind absorbs everything for inspiration and an analytical mind makes it an ‘innovation’.
“Unfortunately, there are designers and marketing people who intentionally look down on the consumer with the notion that vulgarity has a definite appeal to the masses, and therefore they supply the market with a continuos flow of crude and vulgar design. I consider this action criminal since it is producing visual pollution that is degrading our environment just like all other types of pollution.”
― Massimo Vignelli
This profession is for sure a blur- blur between passion and profession, blur between freedom and collaboration, a blur between work and life. The lines are often thin, designers often get so engrossed in work, and never fully satisfied, and often think designs can get better. ‘Art embraces imperfection’ after all.
Simplicity is not the absence of clutter, that's a consequence of simplicity. Simplicity is somehow essentially describing the purpose and place of an object and product. The absence of clutter is just a clutter-free product. That's not simple.
--Jonathan Ivy
Such is a mind of a creative person, a whirlwind of ideas, always active and always restless. Does this make a designer brilliant or merely a mentally exhausted mind? It undoubtedly sets a designer apart though, having the power of imagination and also the ability to bring those ideas to life.