I will deliver “Introduction to Design for Non-Designers” that can be used in daily life and work even if you are not a designer, just knowing basic knowledge about design. The first one is “What is design?” Have you ever thought of email writing as design? In fact, the essence of design is hidden in such places! That’s how it started!

What is design and what is art?

First of all, what is design?
You may be able to explain “decoration”, “beautiful thing”, “problem solving”, “treatment” and “things that shape according to the application”.

There is also a way to decipher from the idea, "What's the difference between art and design?" It has many different ways of thinking, but one way of thinking is that art has its motive for making it in itself. Design is "the motivation for making it is among others." You can say, "Others" can be replaced with the word society. "It's not just about creating shapes, but it is design that we analyze the objects deeply and then transform them into forms." In order to understand the meaning, let’s first look at the history of design.

History of the word "design"

The word design is derived from the Latin word designare, meaning "representing plans as symbols." When the word design first came to Japan, it was translated into Japanese as 'design' and so on. It wasn't exactly reflected in its meaning. And because of France's nationality not to use English very much, they were initially considered to be a replacement for design, but failed to express it in one word. As you can see, these two words are used in English: styling and concept. The word “design” includes the meaning of “creating shapes based on plans and concepts.

The idea of "design" born from the Industrial Revolution

The difference between design and art is not clearly divided by black-and-white, I think there are gray zones, but in the technical sense it seems that design uses art techniques.

If you look at the history of why design was born in the first place, it goes back to the industrial revolution that occurred in England in the 19th century. The mass production that craftsmen had done by hand began to replace machines. They were made initially because they didn’t have proper drawings and therefore only imitating fashions from those days was low quality.

In response to this situation, William Morris, who felt the crisis of overflowing dirty and unbeautiful things in the world, thought that design was important for the first time. While there were times when he opposed machine production itself, his idea of designing came to be handed down later on.
At that time, the so-called paintings and sculptures were called pure art (pure art) and design was called applied art (applicable art), as you can see from those words it was the idea of applying art techniques = design.

Whenever you tell someone something, there's always design done.

It is said that the category of design has become borderless in recent years, but for convenience this time I think about product design and graphic design separately. As a difference between these two, many people say that three-dimensional product design and graphic design are flat, but actually it can be said that while product design "uses" its own purpose as well as graphic design is "communication of information" by doing something with it.

If it is a design that conveys some information, what kind of thing will be included in the word design?If you use the term design in a broad sense "Whenever you tell someone something, there's always design done." It seems to say that.

Then you can say that writing an email is a design. The purpose of the mail is to convey some kind of information to your partner, for example, if you've thought about it and write without a newline, then it's hard to understand: mark a headline, add a newline or do what we usually naturally do.

The question is whether you're aware of it or not. Some designers say they write easy-to-understand emails How easy it is to communicate with the other person" becomes one point in thinking about design. In our work and in our lives, we are repeating “to tell someone something” every day. If you can make use of your design knowledge, there may be new discoveries! Next time I would like to introduce the laws of graphic design that could be used concretely!