Creativity needs a compass.
Graphic design is often mistaken for art’s close twin, and in many ways it is. Art and design share foundational elements like colour, form, and composition. Art can inspire design, and design can be highly aesthetic, acting as a form of "functional art". But there’s one line I repeat to every client and every new designer: if it’s not clear, it’s not design.
Art can ask questions without answering them. It can be moody, abstract, and even confusing on purpose. Design doesn’t have that luxury. Design has a job to do: sell a product, explain an idea, guide a user, or build trust in a brand. Ultimately, while artists ask questions, designers work to provide answers. Creativity is the vehicle, not the destination.
That doesn’t mean design should be boring. The best projects feel effortless because the creative decisions are working behind the scenes: the typography that quietly sets the tone, the colour that directs your eye, the layout that tells you where to look next. When design works, you don’t notice it; you just understand.
Good design solves a problem. It guides someone to the right button, helps them read a sign at a glance, or makes a brand instantly recognizable. Style, trends, and creativity all matter, but they should support clarity, not replace it. The real challenge is balancing expression with intention. A poster can be beautiful, but if no one can read the details, it has failed. A logo can be trendy, but if it doesn’t represent the brand, it’s just decoration. Something can look artistic and still miss the mark as design if people can’t understand or use it.
On the flip side, it can totally work—if you’re, you know, wildly famous.
Some recent examples of brands that blur the boundary between design and art are the Harry Styles and Charli XCX campaigns (both musicians), whose personalities are already strongly understood on a global scale. This is a kind of privileged marketing: the ability to be strange, minimal, or intentionally unclear because mass brand awareness does the explaining for you. When the audience knows the vibe so well, designers can be more playful and abstract without losing clarity.
Harry Styles promoted his tour with large-scale posters built from dense crowd photographs and simple white text reading "WE BELONG TOGETHER." The approach was minimal and almost documentary, letting the audience's emotion do the work. Charli XCX took a similar anti-polish approach: low-fi visuals anchored by acid-green and a deliberately plain sans-serif, with half-finished-looking posters and billboards that read "this is movie promo btw," evoking early-internet culture over traditional marketing.
These are musical and performing artists, of course, but they still have strategic marketing teams shaping how the work is pushed, sold, and released. The visuals were expressive and a little chaotic, yet fans instantly knew what they were looking at because the brand language was already known. Most of us, however, don’t have that luxury. We can’t fire a coded JPEG into the universe and assume the entire internet will decode it like a group chat of devoted superfans.
Creativity is essential, but in design it needs a compass. Make it bold, make it clever, make it yours. Just remember to make it work.
By Riley Kennedy