Design | dəˈzīn |
noun
1 a plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is built or made.
• the art or action of conceiving of and producing a plan or drawing: good design can help the reader understand complicated information | the cloister is of late-twelfth-century design.
2 An arrangement of lines or shapes created to form a pattern or decoration.
3 Purpose, planning, or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or material object.
What’s good design and what’s bad design? Books have been written on the subject for years, going back to the Renaissance— maybe further. From the moment we think of an idea to the last stroke, we’re designing. Some of us don’t think too much about it, and others get really granular about it.
Design is the creative by-product of your thoughts, aesthetics, and intuitions. Fashion designers, when they think of a new line of clothes for a season, think about the colors, textures, fit, and line of their designs. An architect will think about positive and negative spaces created by the shapes and flow of the structures they imagine. A baker shapes and forms the soft dough into a pleasing shape, scoring the tops of the breads before they go into the oven. Teenagers cuffing their pants, spiking their hair, or applying makeup are designing a look for themselves.
Everyone single one of us is a creative designer. We all do some amount of design in our lives. The mere fact that you get up and make choices about what you’ll wear is by its very nature a creative act. One in which you are saying to the world… “Today I’m wearing green because it makes me feel pretty.” And yet most of us don’t think of ourselves as being creative or artistic. Some might argue that they didn’t design it and they simply bought the clothes, house, cake, or tool. But you still had to make a choice. Your sense of what was pleasing, even if it was done without much thought, found in those things we bought, is a reflection of the designs we enjoy.
That should be food for thought. We should not be sleepwalking through our lives, believing that we don’t know anything about art, rather in reality, we’re all designing the world we live in. We make choices that affect the world in small and big ways for ourselves and others. So, when you’re out there designing in your little corner of life, try to make it pretty, not just for yourself but for others as well. Share your joy and bring others into that creative spirit.
