The Basics – What Is Design? A blog to get readers an understanding of what design is.

This is a great question. In fact, it is a frequently asked question and one I often find myself in the middle of conversations about. The answer can be quite hard to explain as design encompasses so many forms, but for sake of simplicity, we can talk about design in three categories; graphic design, industrial design and fashion design. Graphic design involves the visual elements like colour and shapes that are used to create a certain look or feel on a particular product. It includes logo design, web site design and video editing. Industrial Design incorporates the way a product is made and its form like ergonomics and usability. Fashion design is the style of clothing or accessory that has been created through many different ways including colour, shape, material, fit and finish. All three forms have common factors like creativity, problem solving skills and innovation with the goal being making something better than it was before you worked with it.

Tone:informative

What Is Design?

Design is the art of arranging visual elements in a way to achieve a result, or to achieve an aesthetic effect. What’s an aesthetic effect you ask? It is a feeling or reaction that one gets from looking at the design.

A good example of this would be the logo for Harley Davidson. The overall effect is one of strength and power. The image conveys these feelings through the use of black and orange, along with bold and straight lines. The overall effect is one of strength and power. That is what the designer was trying to achieve.

Basic Elements Of Design: Proportion – This includes not just visual elements, but also text. A designer must know what size text should go with what size image, in order to create a pleasing effect. Color – Color is used to create visual interest and to add meaning. Texture – Something as simple as adding texture can really take an image from dull to dynamic. There are many ways to add texture like using gradients, patterns, textures or brush strokes. Shape – Good design uses shapes (or lack thereof) to create balance, rhythm and other effects on the viewer’s eye as it moves through the design. Shape also helps imply movement or direction in a design. Alignment – Alignment

There are two main elements in design: function, and form. Form is how something looks or feels, and function is what the thing does. For example, a chair has a certain form or shape, and it is designed to be sat on by someone. The form of the chair (its look) may be very different from one designer to another, but its function (what it does) will remain the same for all chairs.

Designers use many different ways to create new forms and new functions. They can change existing forms or combine existing forms with new ones; they can add extra features that give a product a new function; they can remove features that have no effect on its function; they can change the order of parts; they can make it bigger or smaller, lighter or heavier; they can make it out of different materials and so on. Designing is not just making something pretty – design involves thinking carefully about how things work and how people feel about them.

Designing is not easy: there are always many choices to make. When designing a chair you might think about what kind of wood or metal to use, which colour would look best and how comfortable the chair should be when people sit in it. You might think about whether it should have arms or

Design is the method of putting form and content together. The form of a product is how it looks; the content is what it does. When form and content work well together, a product is more usable-it’s easier to learn, easier to remember, and easier to buy.

It’s tempting to equate good design with beauty, but that’s not quite right. Beauty is a subjective quality. Beauty also has little to do with usefulness or profitability.

Good design means that someone was thinking about how a person would use the product. It means there was some thought about whether someone would even want the product in the first place.*

In the visual arts, design is an integral part of the creative process, and is a primary determinant of form in created works. In both objects and buildings, design serves to unify and organize their structure and elements. A craftsman or artist designs a piece to convey an intended appearance.

Design generally adds value to a functional item, enhancing its aesthetic appeal. An item designed well is aesthetically pleasing, as well as functional. Designers can apply aesthetics, novelty and purpose to increase the interestingness and appeal of an object’s design.*

Design relies on knowledge of appropriate design principles, such as harmony, balance, color schemes, proportion, scale, repetition, rhythm and unity. The principles are applied to create aesthetically unified artwork that may be more appealing than works lacking such unity.”**

**Source: https://www.visual-arts-cork.com/the-basics/what-is-visual-arts/design**

What is design?

Design is the act of engaging with both the outside world and the inside world in order to solve problems. Design is a creative process that utilizes knowledge, research, planning and strategy to solve a problem or create a new idea. Design is an art because it requires skill, talent, imagination and originality. Design is a science because it requires logic and reasoning.

Design is the act or process of creating a plan or convention for the construction of an object, system or measurable human interaction. It can also be described as the creation of a plan for something already in existence, such as a building, a campaign, marketing effort or another production. Design has different connotations in different fields. In some cases the direct construction of an object is also considered to be design (see “industrial design”).

The word “design” when used as a verb may include any or all of the other aspects that come under the term “design”. Design can be perceived as a creative act, which may lead to new forms to fulfil new functions. The key function of design is communication. Designer and historian Victor Papanek referred to design as “a tool for thinking”, because it is used to create objects that people don’t already know how to use.

Although not always, design often involves applying aesthetics or usability criteria to the aesthetics and usability of an object.[2] This distinction is important because design usually concentrates on the aesthetic aspects while usability considers mainly user’s efficiency.

When practical considerations are accounted for, design need not be entirely deliberate; “the unconscious aspect of some designs are more ‘designed’ than others.”[3] The distinction