Perhaps some of you already took a look at my About me page, where I felt the necessity to specify my art-studies as design-studies. Well I didn’t do this for the sake of precision but because there is a clear difference between those terms! If you should apply at an university/college for design please make sure not to mix up the terminology! You can’t imagine how touchy some professors are…
At the time I started applying for the qualification tests I wasn’t sure whether to choose the Art Academy or Design University. I noticed how little my knowledge on the difference was. So I decided to attend some informative events at the different institutions, as far as they offered any. Sadly but true, most Art Academies didn’t offer any, so I investigated their Internet pages. I didn’t find much difference to design concerning the topics (modules) to be taught, but the qualification tests were a whole different thing…
Left with no big choice I went to a few design-counselings. The very first question the guiding professor asked us was what design meant to us…Silence. The prof wasn’t surprised at all. Some tried to describe design as the process to invent how something should look, like in fashion or product design. We gave many examples but no clear definitions. After hearing enough the prof gave us a clear (and in my eyes somehow antagonistic) answer: “They (the artists) hang out in their studios trying to change people’s viewpoint of the world and we (the designers) show people the world in different ways. In no way does that mean we’re not creative, ’cause that’s what they think of us, a bunch of artisans producing images, not creating!” Everyone was startled by his harsh choice of words, I guess they’re some issues between designers and free artists…
But the prof’s answer didn’t satisfy me. I thought about the question for a long time. And it turned out to be a good thing since I needed to answer it once more, on my own, in writing in the last phase of the application. So here’s what emerged:
Free Art >> uses the artist’s personal ideals/points of view in the process of creating work of art + meant to put the viewer in a state of questioning their own points of view about certain topics
Design >> the designer (in most cases) works for someone else and is assigned with the challenge to visualize and actualize his employer’s ideas, not his own BUT sometimes this distinction is not as clear
So, what happens when I try to describe a fashion designer and a concept artist with the desriptions I just came up with? Prominent fashion designers usually do not have employers. And concept artists do have employers. The latter problem can be solved fairly quick by looking the term up on the Internet. It turns out “concept art” is a misleading term for visual design. The fashion problem is a bit trickier, I think. Clearly there are many “free” fashion designers out there, but what distinguishes them from free artists is the fact that their works of art do not really make you thoughtful about something other than fashion… It’s all about creating creative new styles for the pleasure of the audience and not about spreading deep and intense ideas, which are meant to shake the audience’s foundations of thinking. And freelancers are a species on their own, individually changing their roles as an artist or designer.
The bottomline is that various distinctions between art and design do exist, sometimes clear and other times not that obvious, but altogether everyone who is dedicated to either one is an ARTIST!
