What Vincent taught me about design

4 lessons about onboarding, emptiness, professionalism, and reality.

Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat, 1887 (detail)

Empty chairs.

I didn’t expect to cry my eyes out over two paintings of empty chairs. The plan was just to relax with a book during a summer thunderstorm, but Van Gogh (or, rather, the Taschen commentary on his works) has done me dirty.

Now, I will tell you everything about the chairs in a minute. First of all, let’s figure out what XIX-century Vincent has to do with XXI-century design. And why I think there are parallels between his art and what we do.

Yes, we can learn about design from art

Design is… what? Charles Eames said that:

Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.

For your employer, design is what you can do in Figma that they can’t. For me, design is something that makes a system (any system) understandable and safe to use (I stole this definition from Don Norman). Anyway, knowing the definition of design does not make one better at it.

Design is reserved for systems, but essentially, everything is a system. You can find design in a kettle and in Versailles. Design is everywhere where there is a user’s need for it.

Art is more connected to marketing (although, of course, it’s a bit like comparing the incorruptible heavens to the ninth circle of hell ). Marketing generates user needs that are met by advertised products. And art, especially the irresistible, most recognized art in the world, like Vincent’s, answers the need we didn’t even know was there. The need of the great unconscious.

Most people agree that design is not art. Design always has a purpose or a function. Art is whatever an artist makes it about—for a post-impressionist like our Dutch genius here, art was about expressing his inner world, his needs, and his fears (he had about 1,000 of those).

We know art and design are not the same thing, but it doesn’t mean we, designers, cannot learn from the former.