The artist-designer approach
Years ago user interface designers had few variables to manipulate; with only a text-based display, they could specify position on the screen, normal type and flashing type, etc. There was little potential for visual design, and in any case few of the designers involved were trained in the visual arts. Today, new media and bit-mapped color displays allow the visual artist-designer to use techniques and graphic information design to express qualities beyond the simple content of the words. Designers now combine symbolic communication (where the relation to the referent is arbitrary, as in words) with more direct iconic forms (which correspond to the objects represented). Interface design has thus grown from the equivalent of laying out a simple typewritten page to the design of a cross between a complex book and a television program. To exploit its potential, the successful interface designer needs to be someone who has skills, a methodology, style, and knows how to manipulate the power of graphic representation. Because all graphical user interfaces are communication systems, their design should be held to the same standards of functional and aesthetic relevance that have evolved from other disciplines.

Visual Design
Visual Design disciplines include communication-oriented graphic design (often described as Visual Communication) it attempts to solve communication problems in a way that is at once functionally effective and aesthetically pleasing. Design is valued for its fitness to a particular user and task. Design is concerned with producing a life-enhancing aesthetic experience where possible, but the design aesthetic is always related to the intended function of the resulting product. It is concerned with finding the representation best suited to the communication of some specific information. The elegant manner in which this information is arranged and visually represented and that reinforces and enhances the message is the hallmark of good design.

Computer Art and Illustration
Designers are not artists. The artist, like the poet, is engaged in the manipulations of the formal qualities of a particular medium to produce an aesthetic response. All experiences, dreams, fantasies and emotion itself are material subjects. Art is valued for its originality and expressiveness. Art is illusion, interpretation and conception.

Interface Design
The design or redesign of intuitive and effective user interfaces is built on principles and guidelines: it requires both a user-centered attitude, application of a design methodology and development process. It improves the way people can use computers to think and communicate.

Human-computer interface design is an interdisciplinary field. Different disciplines have different priorities, different thinking, styles, and different values. Success can only be achieved through close collaboration between system-sensitized visual and conceptual designers and design-sensitized engineers.