Once upon a time there was an open brief…
Scott Jason Cohen complains of the web: “the whole enterprise is about structure” in his recent article at A List Apart.
Cohen is a web designer who probably would not have agreed with my earlier item on Graphic Designers. He tells us that information architects did a lot of the design at one of his previous jobs, such that little was left to the imagination. “The designers - the ones who went to school for years, studying layout, color, and the effective way to deliver a message in any medium – were now glorified painters”, he says.
It’s an interesting article, coloured by a kind of short-term nostalgia for a time when the web designer did everything, from design to front-end build.
Only a few years on, we no longer live in that world. The Internet is big business, and big business hates unquantifiable risk. Hence the information architects.
Where I work today, there’s not a great deal of creativity in the job. This month’s measure of creativity has been designing a Christmas header for the Intranet, because everything under the header is a business process or an application. Not for nothing am I vastly outnumbered by developers in my department.
So what are Cohen and so many others missing? I think it might be the soul of design. As he suggests: “Every designer I know is an artist. They paint, they play music, they DJ, they sculpt.” True, because these people are looking for the soul of life. Web design is fast running out of soul, because somebody has got to pay and the site has to make a profit. If you could see my annual objectives, my key deliverables and my profit contribution, you would be forced to agree.
A few years ago, I would have raged about this. I bounced anything that did not offer me a blank canvas, an open brief. That’s perhaps a naive attitude to have, but then I didn’t “go to school for years”, so I didn’t realise at first that good clients never let you run amok with their brand.
Now, I have a different kind of idealism. In place of creative experiment, increasingly I am helping people to do their job. I try to work for the user whilst developers seem to work for themselves. Along the way, I innovate, but those innovations are normally about simplifying the enormous complexity of user experiences created during an immature boom in web-delivered business.
It’s up to web designers to find something in their work. I’m certainly not as zealous about web design as design now, but usability is a new and, for the time being at least, engaging part of the job.
