Big Little ThingsCommunication design, the definitive definition.
Recently, we blogged our dismay at discovering that design students today don’t really know what design means today. That blog post generated a lot of conversation around what “communication design” means, and this made us realize that a definitive definition might be useful.
So let’s break it down:
Communication = creation of shared meaning.
Design = a structured way of using creativity to accomplish a strategic result.
So:
Communication design is the practice of creating strategic meaning. And that meaning can be shared through words, images, and experiences.
When the goal is to get a new idea adopted, or to change people’s behavior, or to get people emotionally invested, there’s a whole bunch of shit involved in getting it right. You’ve got to think about the content of your communication, the styling of it, and the method of delivery. In other words, you want to make sure you’ve really thought about what you need to say, how best to say it, and what medium will be most effective. This is what communication designers do.
April 18th, 2008 at 5:27 am
I like it. I’ve used this:
Art is about the relationship between the artist and their work. Design is about the relationship between the work and its intended audience. If it is pretty but does not effectively communicate a specific message to a specific audience to achieve a specific result, it is a simply a pretty piece of confusing visual white noise that fails its intended purpose there by making it art and not design. Put it in a frame, hang it on a wall and call it a stylized visual expression and you may make some money off your creation.
April 18th, 2008 at 7:11 am
So now there’s yet someone else adding to the pile of what they feel is “the” definition, when it’s really just “their” definition. I have mine, Bass has his. Rand had his. I bet Armin has his. Bierut, Scher, Danziger,, Bantjes has hers, and the list goes on an on and each definition (as well as the “definitive” term) is always different, in semantics at least. The philosophy itself varies somewhat less, but it’s no less tragic.
This should be a call, loud and clear within our industry, for certification and standardization.
April 18th, 2008 at 9:55 am
@michael
really? bass and rand and the rest have articulated definitions for Communication Design? it sure would be cool it if you pointed them out to us.
April 18th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Call it communication design, graphic design, visual engineering, graphic art… we all have our own terms and definitions for what we do.
I do apologize for my cynicism though. This kind of thing always comes up and it’s an easy enough of a knee-jerk reaction to have.
What we do is so very subjective that no one will ever be able to pin down, in specific words, what it is about our lives that our parents will never understand.
April 18th, 2008 at 10:32 am
@michael
except that in your list, communication design is the only one that is not exclusively about the visual product. it is actually a different practice than graphic arts/graphic design/visual engineering.
which is why we wrote the definition.
April 18th, 2008 at 11:43 am
I saw this as part of the definitive definition:
“And that meaning can be shared through words, images, and experiences.”
The word “images” made it an all encompassing thing for me.