By Edres D. Tamano | Visual Artist/Architect

“Designer. Artist. What’s the difference?” asked my inquisitive ward upon seeing an embossed script on my business card. In our mundane life, we oftentimes talk about design and art when we deal with beautiful things around us, and without much consternation, use the word interchangeably to refer to the same thing. In the days of yore, a statesman used to be a builder, a planner, a craftsman, and a designer on one hand, and a poet, a composer, a sculptor, and a painter, on the other. Earlier, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci designed monumental cathedrals and painted vintage ceiling frescoes and murals unsurpassed in grandeur ages hence. In a related context within centuries past, Julius Caesar, after his veni-vide-vici spell, designed aqueducts and amphitheaters before mastering the arts of government. Those were masters in their own right, with skills, talents and experiences tempered by practice.

In this day of specializations owing to the advent of formal education (certified attainment) and civil service eligibility (professionalisms), anyone who attempts to be a know-it-all, jack of all trades ends up as a master of none. The academe that made extinct the pedagogues of olden days has laid a systematic approach to the myriad networks of disciplines and has set up the dividing lines. New courses, professions or specialties pop up in almost every academic cycle.

At Fine Arts school, students are taught aesthetic rules of design and composition before they are graduated with diplomas or degrees in arts, architecture, and designs. When they start exhibiting their arts in a group or one-man show, these students are then featured by tabloids as “artists”, with all the inherent euphemisms. We see artists on an empirical note as Homo Sapiens who are emotional, rather passionate, who tends to be subjective in life, relishing the beauty of what they have created, and unmindful of how others interpret the message they impart. To each his own seems to be their unwritten rule in contravention with conventions. Their works are attached to their signatures, even as they wear different –isms, i.e. Dali the Surrealist, Cezanne the Cubist, Manet the Impressionist, and Kandinsky the Expressionist.

Designers, the alter-ego of the artists, border on the practical side of sciences and the ephemeral esthetic nuances. They follow the rules, and often make their own stringent rules for others to follow. When they gain accolades, they are hailed as artists. Some, like Pierre Cardin, Giorgio Armani and Nina Ricci were proud designers, just like architects, landscape architects, environmentalists, and interior planners. Yet movie stars referred to themselves as artists. In the domain of Humanities, sculpture, painting, architecture, music, literature, and all other offspring of the Muses are regarded as belonging to the Fine Arts. No matter how much we set them apart in compartments, all belong to one box, one tenet. Art (ar or arte in Latin) is harmony and harmony begets beauty. In a Far Eastern lingo, ai means harmony and harmony is ar. Design is the form, the shape, the layout. Borrowing culinary terms, Design is the ingredients whereas art is the taste, smell or flavor. And vice versa. We can differentiate the two entities as long as we know how to assemble them as a whole.

(This article, edited by Nessreen Tamano, was published in May 16, 2010 in DESIGN: the Designers Network, Saudi’s first design magazine. - Ed)