Design is not a sub-discipline of marketing
The prevailing notion about design seems to be that it is always subservient to marketing, but that is absolutely not the case. Communication is the overarching discipline. Both graphic design and marketing fall under communications. Graphic design often works in conjunction with marketing, or serves marketing purposes. However, sometimes design itself IS the product, and marketing then serves design.
As designers, we have done a good job of selling our skills as valuable business assets. Companies understand the value of a strong logo, a well-organized, attractive website, and professional-looking brochures.
But it is time to remember that design has many functions. Here are some of them:
- to inform and educate (e.g. airport signage, medical diagrams, books)
- to convince (e.g. advertisements, pamphlets for a company or product — this is when design becomes aligned with marketing)
- to improve everyday life (e.g. product design such as a better dishwasher or a better spoon)
- to decorate (e.g. a poster designed as a keepsake rather than purely as information)
- as graphic art (e.g. designers like Marian Bantjes, Rick Valicenti, and Stefan Sagmeister have demonstrated this)
- as a science (e.g. font design which is based on legibility criteria, visual proportions, as well as style)
- to entertain and amuse (e.g. cartoons and comics)
- to fight for a cause (e.g. Käthe Kollwitz’s social justice posters, or Diego Rivera’s murals)
As Paul Rand, the designer of many famous logos (for IBM, UPS and ABC) said: “To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse.”