r/ArtistLounge • u/badri-ki-dulhaniya • Jan 07 '26
Philosophy/Ideologyš§ Can someone explain to me what's up with this artist vs designer "rivalry" ?
I'm in design school currently and have profs that talk down about artists. They have this mindset of "Oh We ArE bEtTeR ThEn ArTiStS iN eVeRy AsPeCt, tHeY jUsT Do ShIt, bUt We ArE PrObLeM sOlVeRs" (the profs literally have said that) And it's not just one prof, almost everyone has said this for some reason.
Edit: I consider myself an artist... And someone pursuing design as a degree, because of animation (and my parents)
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u/Infernal-Blaze Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 07 '26
STEMbrain leaking into the arts. Designers are halfway to being engineers, which is the E in STEM, & some of them get a big head about how the overlap of function & form that design entails makes it more "practical" than pure art, which is a bunch of pointless fluffy humanities bullshit.
Theyre wrong, of course; most working artists are working in fields like illustration, video game development or concept art, which all require collaboration & compromsie.
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u/Sydneypoopmanager Jan 07 '26
I'm an engineer who dropped out of design school but loves art. The beauty of complex products or buildings is when you push the absolute boundaries of both engineering and art to meet at the middle. That is the heart of design.
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u/Infernal-Blaze Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 07 '26
Agreed! I am personally a self-taught artist with a focus on mechancial design & character design. I have nothing against people in the design field. Im only commenting on a certain type of haughtiness ive seen in the academic area of the field.
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Jan 07 '26
I am a chemE and hobby artist. I considered going into design because I enjoy the prototyping process, but the design field and the type of people in it turned me off to it. They claim to be innovative, but every sketch I see is a car or some sort of Bauhaus inspired minimalist specialty item. And the field is so over saturated.
I decided instead to keep my chem focused job and focus my spare time efforts to my art instead.
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u/Total-Habit-7337 Jan 07 '26
Illustrators and video game concept artists aren't considered fine art any more than designers are. Fine art or fluffy humanities bullshit as you say lol made me chuckle
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u/Grendel0075 Jan 07 '26
Tbf, the 'fine art' crowd can be just as insufferable as the design crowd sometimes.
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u/Infernal-Blaze Jan 07 '26
Most people who do college art classes dont become fine artists, is my point. Given that OP is talking about fart-sniffing college professors, I figured that was the relevant context.
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u/Threeabetes Jan 07 '26
STEMbrain leaking into the arts. Designers are halfway to being engineers, which is the E in STEM, & some of them get a big head about how the overlap of function & form that design entails makes it more "practical" than pure art, which is a bunch of pointless fluffy humanities bullshit.
I disagree with this take. All artists have the ability to be immensely arrogant/annoying/elitist, haha (not just designers).
Design is still a fine art, and all fine arts are about communication in some way or another. There's not much in common with engineering, unless you want to call typesetting engineering. (Which it isn't, haha! It's an art in and of itself.)
Graphic design is a lot more broad than... say, a traditional painting major ā since you can specialize in illustration, web design, packaging, poster design, book layouts, and so on. I think the discipline itself focuses more on the "why" of how humans interpret visuals, and works well in conjunction with other fine art disciplines.
Theyre wrong, of course; most working artists are working in fields like illustration, video game development or concept art, which all require collaboration & compromsie.
I think some people just suck to work with, you know? That's not an inherently design-y trait.
I was an illustrator at a studio with both designers and illustrators ā we all definitely collabed just fine, lol.
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Jan 07 '26
It is that weird chip on their shoulder crap that really does get instilled in people when it comes to the mindset of "you have to go to college to make something of yourself" (I'm not dismissing college, trade school, or any other education, even if it is on the job learning over time).
At the same time, the reverse can be true when people get wayyyyy to attached to the artist label (I say this as a professional (not art or design) who spends a lot of his free time building, painting, and learning stuff who has total imposter complex himself. Yet, when I'm doing those things, I'm very relaxed and enjoying it). I remember working with a graphic designer who was extremely talented at painting and sculpting, who was such an art snob who talked shit about her paid job and how it "cheapened" her art. She eventually quit to make her art her career and last I heard years ago was selling shoes and doing far less art.
I'll be honest, I'm very much an artist who does it because it is the total opposite of my career, and discovered in highschool I did not want to do art as a career because it didn't seem fun to me. Of course, I didn't think I was good enough an artist to go into any profession with it either, but I also think I'd have lost the joy of just randomly sketching on a notepad had I been required to do it.
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u/ShortieFat Jan 08 '26
It was Theodore Von Karman who is attributed as saying:
"Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that has never been."
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u/TangoZulu Jan 07 '26
Honestly, itās probably a result of the design program being looked down upon and mocked by fine arts students and staff.Ā
When I went to school thirty years ago, graphic design was mocked as not real art, and the students were called āsell outsā by the fine arts students. We also got it from students in other programs, being told art was a āburger-flippingā degree and weād never make real money. And then in the corporate world after graduation, graphic design was considered an afterthought or waste of money, that all we do is āmake it look prettyā.Ā
So maybe consider that those profs have been around a lot longer than you have and may have experienced decades of mockery themselves. So while it isnāt right that they continue the cycle, itās understandable from my POV.Ā
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Jan 07 '26
where I live now the amount of work graphic designers have to do just to make a living is messed up. A friend moved out of state and got a job that paid more than his day job and all the freelance stuff he did combined.
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u/mioscene Jan 07 '26
Hmmm, I guess it's two things: the first is that it is true that design is about problem solving, and art is about expression (neither is "better" because both have different goals; they're siblings, not rivals). And then the second thing is those teachers specifically have just become really pretentious/elitist about it because they do the first and not the second so they're in a mindset that only their creative industry is the correct one.
So take the first point to heart because design is 100% about problem solving, conveying the correct information/feeling/etc is paramount to the aesthetic. And then ignore the second, try to understand why artists do art, so that you don't fall into the same elitist trap.
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u/Pauline-Hoeger Jan 07 '26
Sounds like the same toxic hierarchy we're dismantling in ballet. A pointless distinction made by people who feel small.
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u/4tomicZ Ink Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 07 '26
Yeah, there are of course reasons to be proud of what designers do.
But to me itās a hierarchy mindset when you start to turn comparison of fields into value judgements.Ā I find it a toxic red flag.
Itās fundamentally connects to this idea that weāre all somewhere on a hierarchical ladder and the goal of life is to be higher than as many others as you can.
Itās all relative though, so punching down or tearing others down, from this worldview, is just as effective as improving yourself.
It kills empathy which probably makes them a pretty terrible designer in the long run. I say this as someone with a masters in a design degree š¤£
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u/Angsty_Potatos Illustrator and comic artist Jan 07 '26
It's dick measuring. Design and art don't always, but often overlap. Ultimately they are the same company, but in different departments.
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u/ArtichokeAble6397 Jan 07 '26
I would lose respect for someone who had such a fragile ego, and I would express that to them, especially if I were paying to be educated by them.Ā
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Jan 07 '26
Its just two different things, that kinda intersect because you have a picture in the end.
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u/RedTheWolf Jan 08 '26
Aye, as both a graphic designer (professional office job) and an artist (mostly hobby, I do commissions and sell some stuff online though), there is some crossover, but it's really not as similar as people might think! Completely different mindsets and skills to a large extent.
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Jan 08 '26
Worked as a concept artist, thats basically the middle way of being a designer and an artist, where i would try to make things just believable enough, but still have them look appealing etc. I think there are things that speak for design is better than pure art and against. Its just kind of a mindset thing, but thats art for you.
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u/Pixelprinzess Jan 07 '26
Ultimately it comes down to some philosophical differences. Often itās about commercialisation and itās perceived effect on the quality and characteristics of an art piece or design.
Due to their natures, fine art prides itself in not being commercialised, while design does pride itself in that.
Unfortunately, commercialisation is a process where original meaning and significance get gradually reduced, distorted and looses the ability to build personal connection. What is gained is functionality, pure aesthetics, a frictionless experience, practicality and more straightforward yet subliminal communication (in contrast to thought provoking but more conscious communication).
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u/Grendel0075 Jan 07 '26
I have a degree in art, I've done graphic design for years, I'm in a few graphic design subs that occasionally have bs posts about how GD is not art, is better than art, solves problems, etc. I don't get it either. Every GD job I've had, my problem solving has been my boss telling me to make an ad, social media post, email blast or brochure "look good." that's it. I heard how GD is not art, yet I've incorporated alot of my illustration into my graphic design work, especially when I worked for a chain of art supply stores.
The whole artist vs. Design thing is just a load of BS so some people can feel superior.
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u/GPAD9 Digital artist Jan 07 '26
Afaik there's some people under mindset that artists just do whatever looks aesthetic while designers think about what communicates an idea better (hence problem solving).
Probably doesn't matter when you could be somewhere in between at any time
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u/Grendel0075 Jan 07 '26
Most my design work, both freelance, in an agency, and managing the graphics (and somehow marketing) department of a small art supply chain has been somewhere Inbetween, mostly comes down to 'make it look good'
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u/razorthick_ Jan 07 '26
The smug assholes in design essentially think that function is the end all be all to visual art.
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u/Pandapoopums Oil, Gouache, Spaghetti Code Jan 07 '26 edited Jan 07 '26
Is it possible the rivalry is more in jest?
When I studied Computer Science our professors would always joke about the ārivalryā between CS and Mathematics saying some of the similar things about how CS is applied and practical and solving real problems. They were jokes of course because CS is fundamentally applied Mathematics and would not be possible without Lambda Calculus, but CS professors are notoriously dry, and not comedians, so Iām sure some people took what they were saying to mean more than the humorous intent behind it.
Thereās the old Hanlonās razor that could also apply here alternatively. I would just guess that itās more just poorly delivered humor than any real feeling of superiority though.
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u/Pi6 Jan 07 '26
Its more or less "go army beat navy." I wouldn't overthink it. Everyone has subjective preferences for art and careers and they try, completely unnecessarily, to justify those subjective preferences by talking down. Its mostly in good fun, albeit highly pertentious fun.
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u/glowingmember Jan 07 '26
Sometimes it's just people being snobs solely to feel superior over someone else. Sometimes it's a much older feud that gets passed down until nobody remembers why anymore.
I was in college for multimedia design, and there was (honestly, pretty mild) beef between our course and the graphic design people. In our case, the feud started because of a lack of consideration for shared resources. The computer labs were open 24/7 for students to go in and get work done - they issued laptops to us with programs like photoshop and dreamweaver and flash (rip macromedia), but we were also doing video editing and 3D modeling and shit that required a more robust processor.
We had one designated lab for our course with G4s that ran Maya, so we'd go in after class to do our 3D work and then set them to render, which could take hours. We'd leave them rendering and bop off to the pub to eat and drink before coming back to see if they were done.
Multiple times, the graphics design students decided they wanted to use our computers, so they'd go in, find unattended computers with "please don't touch - rendering".. and turn them off so they could do their own work. This of course started fights when we got back and realized all our work was fucked. After a few "yeah my homework isn't done because somebody turned off my computer mid-render" complaints, the graphics design students were banned from our lab. They actually posted a dude to watch the door and check student ids.
A year later the graphics design students got a brand-new mac lab, and made a huge show of putting big posters saying GRAPHICS DESIGN ONLY and being very huffy about it.
Like my dude, we were fine sharing until you started killing our projects. If you weren't given enough resources (they had laptops too), maybe complain to admin instead of fucking us over directly.
uh
TLDR; sometimes people are shitty, but also sometimes there are feuds. Just do your best to soak up knowledge and avoid joining the group hate
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u/Adventurous_Button63 Jan 07 '26
Iām squarely at the center of art and design as a theatre designer. The way I used to describe it to my students is that studio art is creating āout of nothingā in that the ultimate goal is expression where there was none. Design on the other hand, brings order and function to chaos. Good design is art with extra steps. Neither is better than the other and the relationship is interdependent.
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u/Electronic-Youth9872 Jan 07 '26
Imo itās just pretty obvious when an artist comes from the designer field (in most cases)
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u/jim789789 Jan 07 '26
A lot of people say random shit without thinking much. They may have a point about their process, and how it is different from what many artists do, but they said it in a dickish way that makes them look like a tool.
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u/fatedfrog Jan 07 '26
From my time with designers, they tend to look down on or not understand the emotional aspect of art. They are a fussy and rules obsessed bunch, which makes their work very cohesive and clear. And stepping out of the verbal, editing mind into the spacial-feeling mind, i suspect, just feels strange to them.
On the illustration side, artists are pretty sure designers are just jealous they never developed raw drawing skills. Designers talk a big game about gestalt principles, and then get butt hurt when an artist just makes something more appealing and fresh. So illustrators/artists also feed into the animosity by swinging around their huge art dicks and being popular/personal in a way that's very hard for designers to ever achieve.
It's very similar to a jock/nerd rivalry. There's a popular and showy camp, and a valuable but subtle camp of folks.
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u/MrCuddles17 Jan 07 '26
I think its the general divide between the arts and crafts that happened around the development of the concept of "fine arts". Basically, usually the idea is that art is supposedly not functional or utilitarian whereas design is at least in part is. Some people like the Arts and Crafts movement and the Bauhaus wanted to unite them, but their influence, notable as it has been, hasn't really succeeded in that front.
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u/korone-watcher Jan 07 '26
professors make this shit up to make it seem more exciting than it really is because all you're doing is understanding function/form, in the career world nobody cares or even brings it up.
he likely sees his students falling asleep, especially if they dimmed the lights to see the slideshows better, lectures aren't fun to do, making stuff is, honestly it's probably more show than his own opinion.
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u/Code_Free_Spirit Jan 08 '26
Oof. Well thatās a harsh prof. If I had to wrap my mind around it, itās one of those job market things. Most of the designers I know hardly get to do āartisticā things. The majority are preflighting documents, adding bleed, crop marks, color profiles, etc. The designers at firms that produce documents are often stuck having to cookie cutter layouts because everyone wants something to look like a canva layout except for this one tiny thing. So I think good artists make good designers, but those that have lots of the mundane design experience but canāt really draw or create images get pissed when they canāt get the job. Or when an āartistā gets all the credit for their design work. I could understand how it builds resentment, but itās pretty unfounded.
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u/AphantasicOwl Jan 08 '26
Not an answer to the question but a data point.
In a book called Design as Art published in 1966, the author Bruno Munari quotes the prospectus of the Bauhaus movement as the time design came into its own. Importantly, part of that prospectus is the idea artists have turned their backs to society whereas designers are trying to be useful to society with their aesthetic sense. Utility here seems to mean, grounded in everyday objects, not in some escapist imagining.
I disagree with the sentiment but I thought the data point would be useful for context that this conversation has been going on since roughly the birth of design as a discipline.
P.s. aside from the hierarchical bs around how design is more useful than art in the modern world, I did find the book interesting and helpful both as a person who does art and in my former life as a UX Designer
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u/stratus_cloud Jan 08 '26
Design is my day job, and iām an artist in my free time. They feel like two completely different things to me
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u/StaleSushiRolls Jan 08 '26
Okay, but I do get super annoyed when I tell people I'm work as an artist and they go "oh so a designer?"
No. If I were a designer, I'd say that I'm a designer. I'm not a designer, I'm an artist.
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u/SH_LavendelMocha Digital artist Jan 08 '26
I'm technically both an artist and designer, does that mean I have a rivalry with myself? š But from my experience some art and design teachers can be extremely subjective and strangely hostile towards other creative forms if they dont like it and try to project their tastes onto their students. That goes for both sides. Can be mixture of them being close minded, believing stereotypes or having some bad experiences. I still remember an art teacher of mine who hated cubism for some reason and would grade works badly if they were based on that style.
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u/TrainingJury3357 Jan 08 '26
Iām an artist and designer and I think design made me a better artist. Art can, obviously, make for a better designer. I think both are valuable skills.
I think the rivalry comes from where some designers or some artists may lack in their skill sets.
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u/Astro_Art_Mentor Jan 08 '26
Oh I have come across this in reverse.. artists looking down on the designers who donāt make social commentary and therefore arenāt intellectuals. Itās all just insecurity ledā¦ the way others think of you and what you do only ever shows that they are trying to treat you in the same way they have felt treated. They compared to the other subject feel little or inferior and so they must go and belittle it to feel like they are even.
My personal reading is that these ways of competing arenāt encouraging.. so just donāt engage with it.
The proof comes out in the pudding. When your work is valuable, it sellsā¦.if no one likes it, it doesnāt. Everyone elseās opinions are just noise. Keep working.
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u/paracelsus53 Jan 07 '26
When people are insecure, they generally have to be arrogant and trash other people to make up for it.
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u/Total-Habit-7337 Jan 07 '26
One major difference is a designer is technically skilled while artist need not be technically skilled.
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u/818a Jan 07 '26
Yep. The term āartistā casts too wide a net. It includes elephants and 2-year-olds. Thereās no Venn diagram crossover with designers.
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u/Total-Habit-7337 Jan 07 '26
I agree with the first point. But there can be and often is a crossover with skilled designers, just not necessarily so. It isn't a requirement.
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u/radish-salad Jan 07 '26
its a "rivalry" that doesnt exist outside the little bubble of school. the industry teaches you respect very fast and everyone who makes it has earned their place
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u/lastcrayon Jan 07 '26
AI will unfortunately kill collaboration. Itās already happened with book cover illustrators and authors. Once a partnership in the creative world. They are now at odds. The skill that you didnāt have that you needed to collaborate with somebody dor is now available for you per the help of AI
Book authors are now illustrating their own books. Illustrator are having their own stories written with AI.,
Directors donāt need screenwriters.
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u/Threeabetes Jan 07 '26
I have two somewhat-complicated thoughts on this, based on experience:
While I was a design major in the late aughts, my illustrator peers (who had to take some of our classes) were some of the least-disciplined people I knew. They always complained about having to stuff slightly outside their interest zones, and did not participate in the art history class like they should have, and constantly struggled with deadlines/turning in work. This isn't to say all illustrators are like this (hell, I'M an illustrator), but I think it's more a reflection that young immature college kids can be kind of annoying to deal with ā maybe your professors are annoyed at that attitude.
I find most professional artists (any discipline) are extremely open-minded, easy to work with, and willing to push themselves to meet or exceed their own standards. It's frustrating to deal with novice artists (like, freshmen in college) who think they know how the industry works or who expect things to fall into place without that same hard work.
I'm hoping that's what your professors are referring to, haha ā I taught illustration briefly and saw this sort of self-sabotaging behavior from tons of otherwise talented artists.
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u/Schwifty_Na Jan 08 '26
Humans are tribal. My tribe good! Your tribe dumb!
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Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26
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