Preface

I have worked in design for five years. My every working day is Illustrator, Photoshop, Figma, and After Effects, where I make social media layouts, outdoor ads, and websites. Over time, all of that can start to feel strangely useless. Why did I spend so much time on this? Why do I spend an hour aligning this composition? Why am I polishing every curve in an email layout? Why am I making a screen with five CTAs? And where is design in all of this?

That is why I have always asked myself what design actually is. Every definition I encountered felt either incomplete or too subjective. That went on for a couple of years until one day I decided to take the question seriously and set myself the goal of forming my own definition. This article is the result of that search and those reflections. By the end of it, I give my own answer, so I recommend reading to the very end.

Enjoy.

Why Do We Need to Know What Design Means?

Today, a student like me comes to digital courses and mostly learns a set of tools that help produce layouts. Teachers try to spark interest in the profession, but not necessarily in understanding the essence of the profession itself.

That is why when routine eventually arrives and enthusiasm fades, only emptiness remains. Yet that emptiness should actually be filled with a deep understanding of the meaning and purpose of the profession.

There is an informal rule: if the brief is bad, the result is unpredictable. You can apply the same logic to the profession itself, where the result is your career, your contribution, your achievements, your recognition, and the brief is your understanding of the designer's role. Not just in a single task, but across the whole profession.

Another issue here is that the world around us keeps changing. Even 40 years ago designers were creating layouts almost completely by hand. What do we have today? Relentless progress is bringing generative neural tools to market.

How did we get here, and how do we adapt to it?

Stephen Anderson sums this up well in his Medium article:

Even though the designer's tools are constantly changing, it is deep knowledge of the craft that helps us deal with the rapidly changing world around us.

"What designers do is changing. But also: What designers have always done is not changing. What doesn't change in all of this is what has always defined us: A mindset."

What Design Is Not

• Engineering and architecture are not design. Engineers rely on scientific and technical knowledge such as physics and mathematics, while designers rely on psychology, aesthetics, and ergonomics. For example, aerospace engineers design a rocket so it reaches the right orbit, while designers work on comfort and understanding for astronauts by designing interfaces and instrument systems.
• Art is not design. The two areas may overlap, but their goals differ. Art is often not primarily practical and tends to serve self-expression first. Design, by contrast, is meant to solve specific problems and has a practical orientation.

• Everyday life is also not automatically design. Decorating your home, cooking, or sewing clothes on your own are forms of creativity, but they do not always match the design process, which includes:

  • Researching the problem
  • Planning the solution
  • Solving problems
  • Communicating with the user

A Definition of Contemporary Design

Let us return to terminology. Many times in courses, lectures, and other sources, I have heard the following definition: design is the process of solving problems and meeting needs.

This definition pushes design into the boundaries of function and utility. But is that limitation accurate? Let us look at several examples from my own experience:

• Branding. Recently, my team and I worked on branding for a coffee roaster from Syktyvkar. We created a strong identity, brought Komi culture and nature into it, and made something beautiful and compelling. But by the definition above, you could doubt whether we were doing design at all. Meeting user needs here simply means being able to buy good coffee. As designers, we cannot strongly influence that problem through identity alone.
• UI. A month ago, on one project, my team spent a week debating whether a button should be black or green. Even on sites with poor user experience but excellent visuals, functionality may not be the only priority. Zara's website is a useful example.
• Graphic design. You have probably seen posters that look like punishment for the eyes. Yet those same posters often make it perfectly clear what the event is and when it takes place. In practical terms, they satisfy the functional definition completely.

There is a polar opposite example: posters with fashionable and contemporary visual solutions. I made posters like this during the Daily Poster Challenge. But most of them are almost completely anti-functional. They are not created to clearly communicate information. They are created to communicate emotion and sometimes to compete with other designers in how far the presentation can be pushed.

In all three cases, it is important to remember that the general audience may not even notice your effort. That is simply a fact you have to accept. Still, that topic probably deserves a separate article.

The main problem in defining design is finding the balance between beauty and functionality. Modern definitions often ignore the importance of beauty. But if we limit ourselves only to function, we miss something essential.

What Do Others Say?

Now let us turn to major designers and see what they think.

Victor Papanek, industrial designer and author of books like The Green Imperative and Design for the Real World, believed that all people are designers, and that almost everything we do is design. He clarifies that design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.

Paul Rand, the graphic designer who created IBM's logo and identity, wrote in Design, Form, and Chaos that design is more than arranging and composing visual material. Design is bringing values and meanings, educating, simplifying, clarifying, transforming, dignifying, exaggerating, persuading, and maybe even entertaining.

Michael Bierut, a graphic designer at Pentagram and author of Now You See It, writes that design, especially graphic design, is a way of engaging with real content and real experience.

There is also Stephen Anderson, whom I quoted earlier. He proposes a definition of the designer's profession built around eleven principles. I recommend reading that piece separately because the material is genuinely strong.

Still, none of this gives us a clear answer to what design is. We can describe our work through feeling or list it as a system, but all of these frameworks seem insufficiently objective to me and unable to fully cover a contemporary understanding of design.

So I came to the conclusion that I needed to create my own definition.

My Definition of the Word "Design"

Design is artistic planning aimed at meeting the needs of the user and or the business, and grounded in psychological, ergonomic, and aesthetic principles.

1. Artistic planning covers not only graphic design, but also the kind of modeling associated with industrial design. This approach emphasizes multidisciplinarity and the deep connection between different aspects of design.

2. Mentioning "and or the business" matters because design operates in different contexts. For example, creating design for a marketing campaign is primarily focused on business goals, while designing an evacuation map is focused on user needs.

3. By psychological principles, I mean principles used in design to shape things like a coherent brand image, user portraits, CJMs, and so on. A designer does not need to become a psychologist, but understanding how the human mind works is one of the key skills of the profession.

4. Ergonomic principles in this definition split into two categories. First, ergonomics is about the ease of using tools and objects. Second, ergonomics is about perception itself, meaning how individual objects are received. For example, sharp angles and red feel aggressive and dominant, while pastel colors and rounded forms communicate friendliness and comfort.

5. Aesthetic principles in design are shaped by trends, fashion, and time. Flat illustrations and blobs, for example, were especially popular in 2018, but trends change, and new visual tendencies replace the old ones.

Conclusion

This article helped me formulate a definition of design that fully satisfies me. Yes, I may revisit it in the future, and probably more than once.

And although this definition feels the most accurate and comprehensive to me right now, I believe every designer and every creative person should develop their own vision of the craft, their own big idea, their own definition of design, something that can guide and inspire them in any situation.

Whether that means chasing perfect alignment or searching for new forms of visual communication, what matters is finding the area where your own approach is valuable and rewarded.

For now, though, I feel calmer.

Thank you for reading.

Sources

[1] The Design Mindset. What does it mean to be a designer? Stephen P. Anderson

[2] Now You See It and other essays on design / Michael Bierut

[3] Design for the Real World / Victor Papanek

[4] Design Form and Chaos / Paul Rand / Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1993