Design

What's design? Well, a lot of things.

A painter arranging figures in a work is design. An engineer shaping an airplane wing is design. Poetry is a sort of design. Advertising is design. Programming can be design, although it often isn't very good design.

Regardless of the materials and goals, the point of design is the same: to get the most of something, while using the least of something else. The goal can be measurable, like a bridge's strength, or abstract, like a painting's appeal to an audience, but the goal of design is to make it happen, and to make it happen efficiently. The cost involved with design is sometimes subtle; in engineering or programming, costs in materials and memory are easy to see and measure, but in art or advertising the cost is more likely to be in things like time and patience. Adding an element to a piece of art might make it deeper and more meaningful, but it can also make the work as a whole harder to understand. On the other hand, advertisements have to sneak as much meaning as possible into strict time constraints.

All design shares a few key concepts, including its most important tools: iteration and testing. Iteration involves going back over a design that has already been made and trimming or adding to it as necessary to improve its effect. Testing, meanwhile, helps to identify problems or holes that can be fixed by later iteration. In some cases an artist's eye or an engineer's calculations can be valuable "testing", but it's always best to send the design out into the world (at least a little part of it) to see if it works the way it's intended to.

In visual design, this means not just analyzing your own work as it progresses, but asking others to look it over and see if it works for them, too. The earlier potential problems can be spotted, the easier it is to revise them.