Design is the art of making even the most practical things beautiful. At some point of the process, anything created by a human hand has been designed, its form and style chosen to reflect what it says about the owner as much as what the product is supposed to do.

Careers in design are often thought of in terms of art alone, but even the simplest products can have a designer flair.

The ideal of good design for all things can be seen in the La Rinascente department store in Milan. It has unveiled a design supermarket this week, according to Canada.com. The store will carry such mundane items as paperclips, lamps, dustbins and notebooks in designer form - little works of functional art to be used around the home.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that as commercial and industrial design work becomes more consumer driven, designers who can react to customer demands will be most successful. The bureau predicts that employment growth in the field will be somewhat slower than the national average for all occupations, but there should be more than 50,000 commercial and industrial design jobs by 2016.