Designers Create Artifacts, Not Art

The best graphic designers seem to possess the most finely honed aesthetic apparatus of any type of visual artist, when it comes to clearly communicating an idea.

We may not create works on par with the great painters of antiquity or the boldest conceptual artists of our current age, but we create works that have to retain meaning consistently through reproduction. This not only requires an artistic sensibility. It requires great empathy for a body of people -- our audience, per the creative brief -- and a shared cultural language that ensures our work doesn't turn into a tangle in our audience's minds.

The work that I admire as a designer, the work that contains a sense of meaning no matter what the cultural or business context, retains a kernel of the impact that a true, physically-made piece of art would hold. But it isn't art.

Strong designers are able to scrape away at the page or the computer screen until they uncover a hint of the aura of art, then shape it into a consistent communication. This takes patience, intuition, and the ability to smell an idea that can survive replication in its production and delivery. Clear conceptual thinking. Simplicity of thought that is consistent in delivery. Otherwise, the audience can't clearly discern what you want them to feel.

Any posturing from a designer that they are an artist of any stripe only holds true when they're making personal work. Calling your day-to-day design work in a corporate context artful does not mean that it's art. (Though many agencies I've worked at hang the actual designs we've done around the office, artfully shot and presented as such.)

The critic Walter Benjamin, whom I had to read when in college, made a huge impact on my personal design work only because I've resisted his thoughts for some time. Of course, in resisting them, I was only validating them:

"That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art... One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes the plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced..." (from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction")

Walter Benjamin published these words in 1936, and it never reached an English-speaking audience until 1968. I can think of no better description as to what designers need to be aware of in their work -- and their own disposition.

Design ideas have to transcend the computer and consistently create the same impact in our audience's minds independent of delivery medium. Our work is truly "conceptual art," just married to a commercial parent and continually attempting to resist the flattening that occurs in mechanical reproduction. It also, through its replication, ceases to be individual and instead becomes cultural. Political. Part of a discussion that transcends the personal.

All of this said, however, points to a painful truth: because of its reproduction, design is generally lacking in tangible value compared to a singular work of art. There may be an art of creating effective advertising or a competent brochure, but that doesn't mean that the ad or brochure in its reproduction ever holds value independent of its association with a product or service. The Internet blew that argument right out of the water.

If you're a product designer, then what you create can add value to a product for sale. Designers can create artworks that are sold in limited editions and are viewed as art. A well-crafted identity can skyrocket the overall equity of a product. But the vast majority of design work that we create is valueless without association to something tangible and meaningful. Sure, you can make beautiful logos all day long -- but if they aren't attached to a real company or political candidate, what weight do they really hold?

The highest praise we can give to design work is that it perfectly resonates with thoughts and feelings latent in the audience, and draws them out effectively. Artistic means may be the delivery medium, but in the end, it is merely an artifact that generally ends up in the recycling bin, awaiting its return to the zeitgeist.

(Except for this gorgeous monoprint I want to buy from Hatch Show Print... is it art in the vein of Robert Rauschenberg? Is it design in the vein of the recent explosion of gig poster design?)