Creativity is Not Design - Design Test 2

I felt it hard to read this post with an accusatory finger constantly pointing in my face.

While I do agree with the point of the piece to an extent, I can't say I agree with the delivery. I found myself on the defensive even though I've taken college courses on design. I don't think an aggressive, elitist stance really ends up helping anything in this case.

Andy's thesis, "Creativity is not design," is pretty obvious. I'm not sure anyone ever defined creativity as design. What I think he means is, "Design is not creative," and I think that's pretty short-sighted.

Design is not art, it is, however, problem-solving, and being a good problem-solver requires a capacity to think creatively. Creative design doesn't mean ignoring accepted principles of hierarchy, spacing, etc. Design goes deeper than that. For example, think about the way that Google has implemented it's own cross-browser CSS button style. The button doesn't look very different, but Google designers were smart enough to know that the variety of default browser buttons detracted from their brand. Google designers (very creatively) devised a solution that is lightweight, accessible, looks the same across browsers, etc.

I work as a web analyst, so I have plenty of opportunity to see, quantitatively, just how important design is, and how often it's missing. Pretty but poorly-designed websites often under-perform by a factor of 10 compared to industry averages, for metrics as simple and basic as bounce rate or conversion rate. Just with exposure to some of the basic stumbling blocks I've seen sites trip on, I have enough domain-specific common sense to figure out about half of those questions.

I think the author exaggerates the divide between creativity and design, although not by much. I couldn't make a web site to save my life, because my creativity is zero, but when someone else makes one I have enough of a sense of design to know what they did wrong. So creativity is still necessary in design work.

Lots of evidence of Bauhaus quasi-mystic ideas in this test, talking about the 'energy' of a composition, 'visual influence'. All ideas rooted in early 20th century abstract expression, which I suppose are now widely accepted but are by no means the universal truths they were presented as.

Some mid-century rational design thrown in for good measure, swiss grid systems etc. which are under going something of a renaissance through their recent discovery by web designers, but they also aren't a universal panacea for design ills. You need only look as far as Jan Tschichold's (a prominent exponent of modern typography) return to traditional typographic forms in his later career for evidence of this.

I don't doubt his assertation that there are a lot of incompetent charlatans in graphic and web design, but I do think his view that modern design educators are failing their students is probably due to many of them having moved on from the Bauhaus/Swiss modernism touch points he seems so firmly attached to.

I am not a designer. There that's out of the way. What I am is a one person shop working on my own project when I'm not working for the MAN. I hope that some day I will be successful enough to hire a great web designer at $10000/hr but until then It would be nice if the author would help to improve the general knowledge of design instead of presenting it as a black art only bestowed upon the eleits.