[joe_the_user]

Your criticism seems to center around your dislike of him using "design" as a shorthand for "graphic design". But this is hardly unique to the author to say the least.

In any case, what you go to say hardly contradicts what the author is saying ... except if you redefine what he's saying as being about you think "design" ought mean instead of how he's clearly using it.

[danilocampos]

(shrug)

Words mean things.

If I cry out, at the top of my lungs, that "Pizza is fucking bullshit!", then go on to say that I hate how pizza kills people, tears countries apart, and delivers atrocities, people will narrow their eyes and say "Actually, I think you're thinking of war." And then they're going to be a little weirded out that I said something so simultaneously bizarre and incorrect just to get their attention.

The thing is, when someone says "design is a differentiator," they're not really talking about how it looks, either. Because appearance is very rarely a lasting means of differentiation.

My criticism is not that he's using the word wrong. It's that he's invested a lot of flaming in the process of misunderstanding people who aren't.

[omaranto]

I don't this is a good analogy except if you cry out about pizza in a place where people are used to using 'pizza' as slang for 'war'. That's the situation here, isn't it? People in the "startup community" already use the word 'design' in the narrow sense of 'graphic design'.

[efsavage]

Well, they shouldn't. I expect far more from someone calling themselves a "designer" than their ability to draw a nice button or pick decent fonts. I expect them to be thinking about interaction, flow, "how it works", and so on.* If not, then they're qualified not as a "graphic designer", but as a "bad designer". If someone only wants to draw, they can call themselves a "graphic designer" and I'll call them when I just need a graphic (i.e. never, since I don't work in print).

* I expect the same from anyone who has anything to do with a UI/UX.

[vacri]

Pizza is a subset of war?

[einhverfr]

No, as per the original post, I guess war would be a subset of pizza.

Remember the Battle of Salamis!

(One blogger took a comment I wrote out of context for humor's sake and asked if we "needed a nice violent movie about Salamis")

[danilocampos]

The competition of building a winning pizza business is as tiny a subset of war as is making pretty graphics a subset of design.

Design is a huge, varied, powerful thing. Design has moved the world forward, ever since the first human reasoned that he could make his stone tool n% more effective by adjusting it just so. Design brought us locomotives, bridges, precision tools, entire revolutions of industry.

In other words, conflating making things pretty with the enormous might of what humans do with the act of design is as silly as conflating pizza and war.

Life is just so much more interesting than that.

[shadowsun7]

It's hardly his dislike - design has meant, for the longest time, how things work, not just how things look (well, to be exact design is a balance between materials, functionality, and aesthetics). Design is more than just art.

Don't believe me? Name me one design award that awards aesthetics alone. You won't find one, unless you're looking for an arts medal (edit: even graphics design awards have some sort of form and function criteria).

[dextorious]

Even if he redefines design to "how things work", the author is still correct.

Who cares 1) how well something looks, and 2) how usable something is, if that thing provides no value to him?