Design As Art

My philosophy on design can easily be ridiculed and maybe it should be. Because I don’t believe design should only work or only look good. I believe it should be more.

Whenever I talk about design, someone inevitably quotes Steve Jobs: “Design is not what it looks like, design is how it works.” Fair enough. But that line gets thrown around like a moral code, as if aesthetics were sin and usability was virtue. Jobs himself knew better, he was surrounded by designers who made things that looked beautiful, not just function properly. There’s a difference.

I’m not dismissing functionality. I’m talking about design as emotion, as the silent language between form and feeling. Because what’s the point of building something that works flawlessly but looks soulless? A perfect system that nobody remembers, nobody loves, nobody wants to show off.

In graphic design, sure readability, alignment, and clarity matter. But if your work is clean but boring, what have you really achieved? A manual, not a memory.

Design should seduce before it explains. It should live in the mind after the message is gone. Function tells you what something does; form tells you why it matters. That’s the tension I care about: Design as Art. Art doesn’t justify itself with metrics. It doesn’t beg to be useful. It challenges you to look again, to feel again. And in that sense, design that moves beyond instruction and into emotion becomes art.

Maybe it’s impractical. Maybe it’s pretentious. But I’d rather make something that breathes than something that merely functions. Because the world already works. It just doesn’t feel much anymore.

Highly recommend watching this video on why aesthetics should matter: https://youtu.be/tWYxrowovts?si=P0DSnsDOV4W_a54F