Side of Sauce

It’s a wide, wide chasm — I assure you.
I consider myself a scientist. In college however, I took many art classes. I drew lots and lots of naked people, which was exciting and liberating — for them. For me it was about blushing in the light of ignominy while the professor critiqued the lack of detail in the nether region of my drawing of a male subject. “Look at this drawing, class — you will notice that the subject doesn’t have a penis…”It didn’t take me long to figure out that the art department was a helluva lot more entertaining than the science department. For example, there were long-haired art professors who chalked up their career in art to youthful enthusiasm and were happy to make you vegetarian bean stew provided you were attracted to father figure types. There was the annual pumpkin carving contest in which the negative space pumpkin inevitably carried the prize year after year and there was pot smoking, underage drinking and lots and lots of angst (pronounced aaaangst).

So, when I decided to get my graduate degree in art instead of science, I expected a whole lot more of the same — I expected dirty hippies, I expected marches on Washington, I expected negative space pumpkins, but most of all I expected to be good at it. After all, I had already ‘been’ a scientist and science is harder. Silly me.

During my first week of graduate school, when I received my first (design) assignment, I did what any good scientist would do — I did research. I covered all the angles; I looked at what had been done before and then I spent late nights basking in the glow of a desk lamp creating what, given all empirical evidence, could only be a veritable masterpiece.

Unfortunately, my instructor felt differently. When I got up in front of the class to show off the product of many a late night labor he told me that it was crap (he used those exact words). In fact, he told me for about 15 minutes while I stood there in the middle of the room twisting my toe into the ground willing myself not to start sniveling. I guess I had a long time to contemplate failure while standing in front of the class for what seemed like days. In the end though, I didn’t get it. He asked me to design an object and I did. There was a problem and I solved it. How could that be misconstrued as failure? Clearly, art school wasn’t for me.

In my previous scholastic efforts, the amount of work I put into my studies was directly proportional to how well I did, which by the way, is clearly not the case with art. Working your ass off is no guarantee the populace at large is going to like (or buy) your work. Thus a ‘good designer’ is not defined by the amount of effort he or she puts into his/her work.

Designers like to talk about right and wrong. In a field so marred by subjectivity, designers scramble to draw some lines in the sand to provide a benchmark for ‘good’ designers and ’sucky’ designers. For example, there are rules of aesthetics, typography, composition, and color to consider. As designers we can’t just follow our own whims willy-nilly; we are beholden to clients, which means that we either take it on the chin when our clients tell us to change the color of our design to hot pink or we go down fighting. Designers are not just mere artists, but ‘visual scientists’ with an uncanny sense of how to make objects not only beautiful, but useful as well.

We in the design world often speak of ’solving the problem’ as in ‘designers are just problem solvers’. When you ask a contemporary designer what he/she thinks is more important: form or function, you will only get disdain. Every designer knows the answer to that question is that both are equally important. If one must be sacrificed for the sake of the other, than it is aesthetics (function before form). Like, duh — just take a look at Apple –yummy-looking desktops, laptops and iPods, but competitor battery life is twice as long, you can use a Mac laptop as a space heater it runs so hot and don’t even get me started about the overall cludgeyness of the iPod (although I have to admit it is getting better…)

So if function is as important as we say it is, then why is it we go crazy over beauty? It sounds great to say that form comes before function (it is so purist), but in the RL (real life) it simply is not true. We are all suckers for a good-looking piece of ass. As a result, the designers who got the highest accolades in my graduate program were not the ones with the best ideas, but the ones with the most beautiful work.

That is when it hit me. Art is about subjectivity and science is about right and wrong. When I paint a picture it is open to interpretation to everyone. You can hate it or love it — you can tell me you hate the color, the medium I used, or the subject matter, but in the end it means nothing. Who determines whether I suck or not? If I do a math problem it’s a different story. It is hard to deny that 2+2 doesn’t equal 4. In fact, you can argue until you’re blue in the face or until you prove me wrong, but until then I have the solace of knowing I am right — end of story.

The problem with art is that it has a low barrier of entry. It is hard for the average person to tell a rocket scientist that (s)he sucks at being a rocket scientist, simply because the average person is not sufficiently versed in rocket science. Art, on the other hand, is open for discussion. To have eyes, ears and the ability to voice your opinion is all it takes to make a value judgment about the relative skill of an artist.

So, if art is about subjectivity, than who determines what is good and what is bad? We love to say that each person decides for his/herself which is good art and which is bad art, but on a large scale that is simply not true. Whether a piece gains notoriety goes beyond individual taste and more into the realm of popularity which starts to feel a little cheap, if you ask me. Once artists were seen as ultra-hip, long-haired freaks on the forefront of popular culture when in actuality they are all just homecoming queens competing in a popularity contest. That’s depressing.

So, if science is about right and wrong and finding the truth and art is about winning the popular vote, then where the heck do I fit in?

My crossing over into the land of subjectivity was not an easy one. For the past two and a half years I have struggled with finding a happy medium between science and art. I wanted the effort I put into my work to be related to my development as a designer and artist. I wanted to be a ‘good’ designer. Grad school made me realize that the difference between ‘good’ designers and ‘bad’ designers is nebulous; that I was a good designer all along, regardless what my professor said.

Being a designer is a little bit like walking a tightrope — you never feel entirely secure. You spend your profession doubting your ability and your talent — you are dissatisfied with your work, you work like hell, you push a piece of type one pica to the left because it feels ‘better’ there and you have no idea why. This is what makes a better designer. The best designers I know are self-critical, introspective and they march to their own drum regardless of what the popular voice tells them to do.