I was at a construction and finance event, not exactly my usual crowd, when one of the panelists said it.
He was a financing person, describing his experience working with designers, and the comment came out the way you might say “traffic was bad this morning.” Casual..not cruel. Just matter-of-fact. “Designers think they are artists.”
I did not say anything. I smiled and let the conversation move on. But the comment stayed with me longer than it should have, and the longer I sat with it, the more uncomfortable it became.
Not because he was wrong, but because I slowly realized he was describing something I had been doing without ever naming it. I had been carrying a set of assumptions about design that felt completely reasonable from the inside and apparently made no sense at all from the outside.
That gap, between how designers see themselves and how everyone else experiences them, is not just a communication style problem.
It runs deeper than vocabulary or process. It comes from beliefs designers rarely examine, beliefs that quietly position the work as personal expression even when the designer is convinced they are being objective. And until those beliefs get named, the conversation between designers and clients will keep going in circles.
I had three of them.
Good Design is Universal. (Or So I Thought.)
Design education carries a quiet assumption that great design transcends context.
That if something is truly well-resolved, people will feel it even if they cannot articulate why. It sounds generous, even democratic. But there is something convenient hiding inside that belief.
If good design is universal, you never really have to explain your decisions.
Anyone who questions a choice just does not see it yet. The assumption does the defending for you, which means you can sit back and wait for the client to come around rather than actually translating your thinking into language they can work with.
I have been in enough client meetings to recognize the moment this happens. The designer( aka myself) presents something they(or myself) genuinely believe in, the client pushes back, and instead of engaging with the question, the designers/myself finds a more elaborate way to re-explain the original idea.
From the client’s side of the table, this feels like not being heard. And honestly, that is because they are not being heard. The designer has already decided that understanding will come eventually, so the conversation stops being a conversation.
The truth is that design is always specific.
Specific to budget, to users, to place, to moment. Universality is a useful aspiration but a bad substitute for actually communicating.
“My” Design Was Never Really Mine
A few years ago I was working on a library project, and I was focused, genuinely focused, on doing something meaningful with it.
The concept centered on transparency, daylighting, and visual connection between the building and the street. I wanted the library to feel open and alive rather than closed and institutional, and I believed in those ideas.
What I did not think enough about was what that level of openness would actually feel like for someone trying to read, or study, or sit quietly for an hour. Libraries need a certain kind of stillness. Too much visual connection to the outside, too much movement of light, and the space becomes disorienting for the people using it most.
The concept made complete sense from where I was standing. What I had not fully considered was where everyone else was standing, specifically the person trying to find a quiet corner to concentrate in a building that was performing transparency at them.
This is the part that is hard to admit.
By the time a building is finished, the design has passed through clients, engineers, contractors, budgets, building code, and compromises you did not fully control.
But the mental ownership often stays intact long after the actual control is gone. Designers use possessive language, “my our concept,” “my our vision,” in a way that almost nobody else in the room does anymore. The client, the contractor, the developer, they have already moved into thinking of it as the project. The designer is sometimes the last one to make that shift.
From the client’s perspective, this creates a strange dynamic where they feel like they are asking permission to participate in something that is supposed to be theirs. It is not that the designer is being deliberately territorial. It is that the possessive thinking is so normalized it becomes invisible, at least to the designer.
Design as Expression, Not as a Tool
This is the assumption that took me the longest to be honest about.
Tools solve problems; expression communicates something personal. The difference matters more than designers like to admit.
When you are driven by the second motivation while presenting it as the first, something in the conversation goes off without either side quite knowing why.
The client is asking a practical question. The designer is answering a philosophical one. Both of them leave the meeting wondering why the other one was so difficult.
When I was developing the transparency concept for the library, I could give you a full explanation grounded in research, in the value of connecting institutions to their communities, in how natural light affects mood and productivity.
I believed all of that. But underneath it, there was also something that simply felt right to me. An aesthetic instinct. A personal conviction about what architecture should do.
That instinct is not wrong. It is part of what designers bring.
But when a client or developer pushes back on a decision and the honest internal answer is “it feels right,” that is expression talking, not problem-solving. And clients can sense the difference even when they cannot name it. They feel when an explanation is elaborate but the real reason is personal. They feel when they are being managed rather than actually consulted.
Final Thought
I still think the comment was reductive.
Design is technical, constrained, and collaborative in ways that pure artistic practice is not. But I understand now why it reads that way from the outside, and more importantly, I understand why I felt so defensive about it in the first place.
That defensiveness was the clue. If I had genuinely been thinking like a problem-solver, the comment would have just been inaccurate and I would have moved on. Instead it stung, which probably means some part of me knew it was closer to the truth than I wanted to admit.
The communication gap between designers and clients does not close by learning better vocabulary or running smoother meetings. It starts closing when designers get honest about the assumptions they walk in with, including the ones that feel like professional conviction but are actually just personal attachment.
Next time someone tells me I am not an artist, I will probably just say “you are right.” It will only take me a few days to actually mean it:-)
Life Outside of Design Studio 