Graphic Design Legend Milton Glaser on Design & Art

Anne Quito for Quartz: 

Design is not art. It’s a distinction understood by practicing designers, but it still eludes many. In an Oct. 29 talk at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, the 87-year-old graphic design legend Milton Glaser gave the best definition of the practice of design.

“Design is the process of going from an existing condition to a preferred one,” said the 2010 National Medal of Arts recipient. “Observe that there’s no relationship to art.”

This confusion is not just a matter of semantics. In businesses, schools, offices, even newspapers, design is often associated with the art department. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the aim of design. When art and design are confused, the designers’ domain becomes limited to style and appearance.

Jason Santa Maria: Saying No

Jason Santa Maria, at Creative Mornings, speaks on finding the strength to set your own priorities for what you want.

In his own words: “It might be saying no to a project or job, or even something that you think you can’t say no to, but finding the strength to set your own priorities for what you want is one of the most crucial things you can do in life. Saying no used to make me uncomfortable, and despite making many mistakes on my way there, I’ve learned to feel good about saying it. The talk is just a short 20 minutes, but sums up most everything I’ve learned about the topic in all my years working and living.”

Simon Sinek: Understanding The Game We’re Playing

Simon Sinek, talks about technology, millennials, and the importance of practicing empathy during a Creative Mornings talk in San Diego. 

Ada Lovelace, the First Tech Visionary

Betsy Morais, The New Yorker:

Augusta Ada Lovelace is known as the first computer programmer, and, since 2009, she has been recognized annually on October 15th to highlight the often overlooked contributions of women to math and science. The main event is being held today at Imperial College London, with the début of an anthology of essays, “A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention.” “I started to think that one of the biggest parts of the problem was that women in tech are often invisible,” Suw Charman-Anderson, the founder of Ada Lovelace Day, told me. After reading a study in 2006 by the psychologist Penelope Lockwood, who researched the dearth of female role models in the sciences, Charman-Anderson thought that a fête for Lovelace could raise awareness of her noteworthy successors. This year, dozens of celebrations will be thrown around the world, including an “Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon” at Brown University, where volunteers will ramp up Wikipedia entries for female scientists.

Cap Watkins: Treat Your Life Like a User Experience Problem

Too often, the product design, product management, and engineering teams are thought of as three separate entities. This divide, according to Cap Watkins, the VP of Design at Buzzfeed, can lead designers to feel undervalued or even defensive when the product managers or engineers attempt to make suggestions to their work. Having realized this battle at Buzzfeed, Watkins proposed the question: “How do we create a culture of empowerment for design?”

In this 99u talk, Watkins provides a step-by-step process to blur the lines between the different product building teams in an effort to get feedback on not only the work being done, but also the process on how that work gets done. Change is complicated and creating the internal partnerships will adjust the way people work, ultimately for the better. “We have to realize that working together doesn’t mean we’re trying to take each others job,” says Watkins. “We’re just trying to be better collaborators.”