[dasil003]

That's an uncharitable way to phrase it though. The point is more like designers are wannabe Picassos who had bigger creative dreams for their work to be based solely on its own merit without any commercial context, but they ended up settling for a day job solving mundane business problems.

It's no different from an engineer getting a safe job at an established company instead of taking the risk to found a company themselves. Only it's a lot riskier for the artist since there's a lot less money in the (working) art world than in the startup world.

[rwhitman]

Exactly. I used fine art as an analogy here but in reality many of the designers I know have creative ambitions more in terms of music, photography, illustration etc. Basically if you're in a creative job chances are you're doing it because you compromised between the desire to create art and the desire to have a paycheck. Sure there's a handful of people out there who longed to be a designer from childhood rather than adopting it out of practicality, but I'd say they're in the minority