hyalineskies

In The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida highlights the step of the creative process he calls illumination, the core of what we do as creatives: sit back, ponder design ideas, and, out of the cognitive chaos, mold our thoughts into a vision in one inexplicable, thoughtless moment. It is at that point where our love of aesthetics and wild imaginations converge upon the creative concept, and it is at that point when our formulated idea can be improved, prodded at, tested, and either developed or scrapped. It’s what makes us who we are.

Meanwhile, as we sift through the XHTML/CSS/IA/UX/PNG/etc acronym soup, millions of others are going through the same creative process. They’re doing it with various other devices: pianos, vocoders, theremins, tailors’ shears, pencils, acrylic paint, ink, and just about every other tool we have for communicative media imaginable.

Every once in a while, one of these creative endeavours is good - really, commercially good - and tons of people know about it. The common populace may not be able to compose music, but they revel in its aural experience. They may not be able to paint, but they adorn their walls with its aesthetic improvement. They may not produce or visualise the preproduction concepts of the fashion items they wear, but they flaunt them for the world to see. The common populace knows the names of the designers of their other creative goods. Can we really call our aesthetically-improved programming design until we reach this same societal status? Or, maybe, can we reach that status simply by telling ourselves that our skills are worthy of it? We’re on the verge of creating cultural icons of our own Web authorities, but our elite will be more like Versace than Vandross as firms become names rather than their individual counterparts. The Web designer and his or her creative product is slowly becoming something iconic, but before we become self-congratulatory, it is necessary to look at the few things we’ll have to stumble over before our work can truly be recognised as the Web’s equivalent of haute couture.

The social hurdle: The stigma of geekiness

Regardless of the beauty of our front-end work, there is still a social hurdle: our work is a creation on a computer screen, and, regardless of the popular use of technology within America today, the work still carries with it a traditional essence of geekiness.

It’s rather ironic: just today I was at Arby’s listening to the five girls behind the counter talk about Maxis’ award-winning Sims games. They weren’t just talking about how their virtual lives were doing - they explained the scripting-language-like syntax of developers’ debug/cheat codes, talking about how move_objects on allows the deletion and re-initialisation of a Sim’s “comfort” values. At the same time, we still have to deal with the stigma of geekiness.

It’s true that we live in a world of microformats, XHTML, and DOM scripting. We blabber on about AJAX and those not within our circle wonder what insane things we’re doing with cleaning powder. Meanwhile, we spend hours in artistically-oriented software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and Fireworks, working primarily as graphic designers. Thus, as Web designers, we must fill two roles: that of an information architect and that of an actual designer as most of the populace would recognise. New media design has effectively blurred this line of Web creativity to where our roles are sometimes indistinguishable. As these roles of designer and developer converge, we find the web’s elite coming from both artistic and technical backgrounds.

This technical convergence is also doing something else: ironically, it’s actually destroying that same stigma. Although the dot-com boom brought the tech whiz-kids like Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin into the mainstream limelight, the majority of computer work is still pretty nerdy. With more and more embracing that geekiness, though, this stereotype of an ugly, nasal-voiced kid with a pocket protector and massive glasses is still not fully dead. Although we love to perceive ourselves as being the builders of beauty, the best of our industry still isn’t in the ranks of Starck, Glaser, Lucas, or Varvatos.

Simultaneously, other creatives from outside the Web industry have helped to destroy this stigma as well. Courtney Love, best known for her work in the band Hole as well as being the wife of Nirvana lead Kurt Cobain, gave a speech at Digital Hollywood 2000 insulting the RIAA and record companies. Although the core of her message centred around piracy, she carries on about artistic equity, only to support an increasing amount of respect for the Web design industry:

I have a 14-year-old niece. She used to want to be a rock star. Before that she wanted to be an actress. As of six months ago, what do you think she wants to be when she grows up? What’s the glamorous, emancipating career of choice? Of course, she wants to be a Web designer. It’s such a glamourous business!

When you people do business with artists, you have to take a different view of things. We want to be treated with the respect that now goes to Web designers.

The technical roadblock: The non-art of Web design

The work of a web designer isn’t usually paralleled to the work of an artist such as Roy Lichtenstein or the graphics of Milton Glaser. This technical difference puts us in an awkward position: it keeps us from being too kitschy, but simultaneously limits the perceptions of our work.

An amateur designer getting off the ground with their fresh pirated copy of Adobe CS2 and henceforth building awful websites is seen less as a hack designer and more as a student. “Artists”, or, more definitively, artisans, are ubiquitous in our society. When people see other visual artwork they seem to instantly become educated critics: is this knot of copper wire and pile of welded metal plate really art at all? If they believe that it isn’t worthy of the “art” label, it’s rejected immediately. The common website user rarely does the same to a piece of XHTML and CSS within their browser window (given that the site is basically usable:) a commoner does not don the W3C hat and validate pages or attempt to pick out flaws in your markup. To the mainstream, there’s still something alien about web design as art; although painting, music, and print design carry a multitude of technicalities that can be abandoned in the name of abstract opinion, there is some increased respect for the Web creative. Web design structure and standards seem to many to be out of the bounds of this abstraction, and this separation from other art is most likely a good thing as the trendiness of tech reaches its saturation point, as it protects the expanding and improving Web design/development industry.

We, too, are disillusioned by our own subculture as we find our own intraindustry trends such as Ruby on Rails to script.aculo.us, but even with all of the “the web design industry is still looked upon as artistically impoverished in comparison to other creative industries” talk of the previous few paragraphs, we can’t ignore the respect that we are gaining. Ironically, or maybe, in some subversive manner, purposefully, our trendiness is beginning to leak further into the mainstream. The Web’s trendiness as well as the Web as haute couture philosophy is a direct result of our Web 2.0 advocacy.

Trends through advocacy and forward compatibility
After all, most everything we do now was capable in Web 1.0: people could host images on Yahoo! photos, put their bookmarks in some type of exportable file format, or build personal homepages on hosting sites like GeoCities or Tripod. They could download mp3s with search engines long before Napster. The problem inherent in doing these things was the technical background required: server and search interfaces were tricky, running a website required technical knowledge of Linux and Apache, and sites required constant in-the-trenches maintenance of code, just to name a few.

As developers searched for ways to make their own content easier to manage, building high-level content management systems such as Dave Winer’s pioneering Manila, RSS, and XML-RPC, there were others improving their interfaces of web applications to create packages so simple that those without HTML, PHP/Perl, and Apache knowledge could host - and network - their personal sites. With services targeted toward mainstream users such as Six Apart’s recently-acquired LiveJournal and the original Friendster, this UX threshold accelerated the Web. Now, even non-techies use blogs installed from one-click interfaces, Flickr for sharing photos, and sites like Odeo for podcasts, with little knowledge of or concern for the technologies that lie underneath. This transition from low-level code to high-level application built the Web into a mobile desktop-like system - the core of Web 2.0 - thus growing a softer Web built with applications instead of HTML. Now, we are beginning to see Web 2.0’s progression into development, where applications write applications with powerful next-generation tools such as the Rails framework.

In the meantime, as more and more of the technology sphere becomes integrated into the mainstream, many explore our existing subculture. Those wishing to know more about the things we’ve created flock to our personal websites, strengthening and deepening the social structure. The technical newbies gain further insight into our creative world as they try to understand the engineering behind the frontend. If they see their favourite sites or blog templates being consistently created by the same design firms, they will elevate those firms to a role-model-like status. As these mentors are increasingly cut away from the rest of the subculture, a design elite is formed. We have started this process of making firms like Behavior, 37signals, and happy cog the haute couture of the Web, and those using their designed sites or Web applications will eventually reach the same conclusion. It makes us mainstream. Thanks to the powerful design capabilities of CSS and Flash 8, as well as effects libraries such as prototype, we are creating schools of design by doing things in certain fashions. It’s easy to contrast happy cog’s drop-shadow-heavy work with that of Behavior’s grid-structure architecture. These differing developmental techniques help reinforce the elite as not only the leaders of specific aesthetic revolutions, but also as reliable beacons of innovative production, much like fashion design houses like Lauren, Prada, or Armani or film studios such as Pixar and Lucasfilm. Furthermore, it increases the palatability of professional Web design.

Asking authority

Does all of this increasing respect for Web design alter our own perceptions of our work? What about the perceptions of ourselves? I’m not at an elite enough position to judge this for myself - I’m still very much a protegé of Vinh, Cederholm, Bowman, Moll, and Zeldman. Thanks to the social aspect of our community, I sent a few emails off to Jake Tracey of Jaketracey.com, Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street, and Michael Heilemann of Binary Bonsai, all 9rules Network members and some of the most respected (and most-read) bloggers within the industry, asking them the questions above. Each gave an entirely different interpretation of what I had asked.

Jake Tracey, Jaketracey.com

I think people forget how big the world is - even ‘famous’ Web designers like Zeldman and Dave Shea aren’t exactly well known outside of the relatively small designer/developer community. Of course, because of the skills involved, designers can get paid quite a lot, which some might consider to raise a persons ’societal’ level, if only in a material sense.

Roger Johansson, 456 Berea Street

If respect for people working in the Web industry is increasing, I am not seeing it. If anything, in my experience it is the opposite. Web design and development is regarded by many as something that anybody can do. All you need is a copy of Dreamweaver, right? Now, remember that I live and work in Sweden, so things may be different here than in other parts of the world.

Update 25 December 2005

I just read your article, so I’ll try to make a couple of clarifications of my statement in that context.

Generally speaking I’d say web design and development indeed has gained respect among those savvy enough to realise the skills and knowledge required to create websites that are attractive, accessible, usable, and provide the visitor with the information or functionality they want.

Unfortunately, that only includes a minority of people, even among those working in the web industry. Most web designers and developers seem happy to churn out low-quality sites in return for very little money. That, combined with the backlash from the dotcom crash and the fact that some kind of WYSIWYG HTML editor is bundled with many consumer computers is, I believe, what causes so many people to look around the room for someone more interesting to talk to when they find out that you create websites for a living.

Now, this could be my personal, and somewhat cynical, view of the web industry, heavily affected by having worked in it since before the dotcom boom. During the boom everybody wanted to be a web designer, so those of us who already had a job in the industry were respected and envied. After the crash, things changed.

During the last one or two years, we’re very slowly seeing a slight improvement, but it’s nothing like back in 2000.

Just my personal observations, which of course may be completely different from those of other people.

Note: Thanks goes to Mr. Johansson for the update. If for some reason you’ve not been to 456 Berea Street yet, go there.

Michael Heilemann, Binary Bonsai

Eston Does all of this increasing respect for web design alter our own perceptions of your work? What about the perceptions of yourself?

MH: Well there’s the obvious effect of having more and more eyes on ones designs, which certainly has social consequences. Though I don’t think it has any particular impact on my as a person as such. I’ve been lucky in having some of my work spread wide and far, and of course there’s a fame aspect which feeds back into who I am.

But that’s the case with anything which returns respect I suppose.

If anything, it’s made me more aware of what I do, since my increased exposure has made it much more susceptible to being copied by people. So if I do something, I try and do it right from the beginning, to make sure I’m not the root of a new trend of stupidness.

Eston Do you ever think of your work, as it becomes increasingly more influential, as being somehow on a higher societal level than it originally was?

MH: Web design is mostly about information design when it comes right down to it, and as such, yes I do. The easier it is for people to publish and to access other people’s publications, the more we’ll see a society even itself out. The Internet is the vocal cord, the web designs are the language. And the more precise our language is, the better we can utilize it.

The array of different interpretations and responses was actually quite surprising. As I received their responses after writing the majority of this article, I wondered whether or not I was on the right track. Was it possible that we are just being egotistic? Are we simply believing that we are somehow improving ourselves and improving society through ourselves? Was Courtney Love wrong?

I certainly don’t believe so. Heilemann’s final paragraph carried the same sense of social effect that I had had when I had started: The Internet is the vocal cord, the Web designs are the language. This is exactly where we can draw the parallel between our work and that of other creatives: we are working to design more than just our individual sites and Web applications. We are working to build a greater industry. Although illumination may be our call to arms in this creation, it is the passion for the improvement of society’s aesthetics that pushes us into the creative process. Our standards, our design, and all of our “geeky” code all has the same final effect as that of a different type of artist: their technicalities may carry vocabulary with less stigma, but it is not any different from what we are doing.

Maintaining the acceleration of respect and reputability

It will be important, though, for all of us to maintain this respect as we progress. We must communicate with those interested and facilitate discussion. We must strive to open our tight community with the mainstream and continue to make it inviting. We cannot be elitist and must instead be mentors much like the authorities above. If we do act as a pretentious elite, somewhere above the technical masses, we will eventually destroy everything we’ve helped create for the industry and, ultimately, society as a whole. We will discredit our own operations, and with fame comes a responsibility that we must shoulder. We may never see ourselves surrounded by supermodels and other creative celebrities, but we will see ourselves doing more to help the general world as well as our own little niche. (Don’t worry. We can still hope for the supermodels. I’d like one this Christmas, after all.)