Art Isn’t Design. And That’s Why Your Patterns Feel Off.

Long before I started Bark & Blossom Design, I spent years in a graphic design career. Something that a lot of people believe about the field of graphic design is that the job is simply to make things look pretty. But it’s so much more complex than that: it’s how you create hierarchy, clarity, flow, and unity across a whole piece or brand while still creating freshness and newness through variety. 

One of my hobbies is quilting and sewing, so I’ve naturally spent a lot of time around fabrics and beautiful repeats. One day I saw an ad by a creator promoting a course teaching how to make repeating patterns, and I decided “what the heck, I could learn how to do this.” I devoured the course and entered into surface design through an avenue that a lot of designers seem to these days: one-off repeats to sell on Etsy. 

But then I wondered where else I could sell my patterns. I found Spoonflower and I started exploring licensing opportunities. But I quickly realized these avenues aren’t looking for one-off repeats. They want multiple patterns that function as actual collections where my patterns had to work for a particular client or product – a quilting fabric collection, or a set of children's clothing. 

So, I started duplicating my motifs and arranging them in different ways to serve different roles in a pattern collection. I’m a quilter and a sewist so this intuitively made sense to me. Some of my patterns were full and bold and dense, some had more negative space, some were calm and barely there. 

And then something hit me like a ton of bricks… What I was doing was graphic design – just using drawn motifs instead of typography, graphics, and photography to communicate information, and my surface wasn’t reports, brochures, or signs anymore but fabric or wallpaper. I had been doing this for years in my career and I was simply applying what I already knew to this new field of surface design. 

After that revelation came another insight: when a pattern or collection is off, maybe it’s not the art. Maybe it’s the design.

See, a lot of people enter this field the same way I did, but without my background. They believe (like I did) that creating repeating patterns was just making art — and it IS making art — but it’s actually much more than that. Without knowledge of applied design, it’s just art that doesn’t actually function for an end product or audience. It has no job to do, and therefore falls flat. 

That can be hard to see at first, because a lot of new surface designers aren’t designers at all - they’re artists. And, without the fundamental understanding of what design is, it’s impossible to know that it’s the missing piece. 

So, what is the difference between art and design?

Art Is The Patterns Aesthetic

Think of art as the patterns’ aesthetic: it is what gives the work emotion and personality. Art is the drawing or painting, the brush strokes, the line quality, the textures, the particular visual expression of the motifs themselves. Art is what gives the work its soul and beauty. And so, the better the artwork, the more striking or emotionally resonant the pattern or collection will be.

Design is The Patterns Logic

Instead of the visual aesthetic of the motifs, design is the way all of those motifs are organized so they actually work together. It’s the flow of a pattern, the composition, the density, the movement, the hierarchy, the scale relationships, the layout choices, and the role each pattern plays within a collection. Design is what gives the work structure.

When a pattern or collection feels awkward, repetitive, muddy, disconnected, or just not quite right, the issue is often not that the art is bad… It’s that it lacks proper structure and the relationships between the parts are weak.

What ultimately changed for me was realizing that great patterns and strong collections are not built by art alone. They are built when good art is supported by good design instead of trying to carry everything on its own.

And I think that is the piece so many newer surface designers are missing, not because they are untalented, but because no one has shown them how to see their work through that lens. They are trying to solve a design problem by improving the art, when what they may actually need is a better understanding of how the parts are supposed to relate to one another.

That difference between art and design has shaped so much of how I now think about patterns and collections, and it is the foundation of what I’m working on now in my upcoming workbook, The Pattern Collection System — taking design principles I learned in my graphic design career and translating them into a framework that helps surface designers create collections that feel intentional, thoughtful, and built to work.

Surface design is, in fact, a design field (it's right there in the name!), and that shift in perspective made a world of difference for me. I hope it does for you too.

Until next time,