The Difference Between Design and Art
Good web design is far more than a beautiful site, it’s where art meets an interactive user interface and where, in my opinion, superfluous aesthetics takes a backseat to usability and the user experience.
Ensuring that user interactions are as smooth as possible is good design — don’t ever be satisfied with art alone.
Although the design vs. art debate is nothing new, it’s ripe for a revisiting as new CSS3 features and JavaScript (and particularly front-end web development libraries like jQuery) begin to edge their way deeper into our everyday lives.These new capabilities, however revolutionary they may seem, have changed nothing about how we should approach web design in general.
Where Design and Art Clash
Art is a problematically inclusive term; anything in the world can be called "art." The main difference between art and design, then, is that design is simply more restrained. Any artist can look at their work and see it as an extension of themselves, but designers don’t have that liberty. As designers, our work has to be interactive, accessible and consistent. In this way, art goes beyond design because no one would expect someone to say that all art has to be consistent and follow a pattern. That would be absurd! What if cubists set the rules? Our art museums would be terribly dull and without variation.
Examples of Cubism, a 20th century art movement. Above: (01) Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and (02) Le guitariste by Pablo Picasso.
This is what design is: It’s art with expectations, patterns and consistency. It’s art meeting science.
Yes, it’s limiting, and yes, UI designers have to be trained to think inside the box a little. But get over it. You are a designer, not an artist. If you want complete freedom and no friction between your creativity and your work, you are working in the wrong field. Artists can work to their whim, eschewing standards and refuting expectations, whereas designers gobble them up and abide by their every word. Market forces and trends influence designers far more than artists (with some notable exceptions like pop singers and freelance illustrators). With web design, there are so many more things to take account of: your site goals, your brand, your users. These expectations shape every bit of web design, while art remains untouched.
