Design Dilemma

I have been back in the UK over two weeks now and I have just about carved out some semblance of boyfriendless normality to settle into for the next few months until his return, and have resumed a routine that doesn't include falling asleep at inappropriate times and getting up at 5:30 in the morning to 'have a tidy up'. Jet lag has all but been shaken out of my system after a long drawn out process that involved drinking copious amounts of alcohol to help me sleep and equally copious amounts of tea to keep me awake, according to what time the clocks were informing me it was. The last of these things to find their place again is my sadly neglected blog, which was attributed equally to an enormous workload and having WebTerror whenever I managed to achieve some sort of closure from my day's ActionScripting.

Unpredictably, work has actually been...well, I guess...enjoyable. I confessed last week to Yorkshire Lass that I felt guilty for enjoying my work and that I didn't feel that I was actually working as a result. She, quite rightly, told me I was stupid. But I have been bathing in my typical 10% Flash Games allocation for the year and have spent every day immersed joyfully in complicated multidimensional arrays that I pretend to understand, making fantastically irritating sound effects and creating amusing little animations which are usually connected in some way to the multidimensional arrays, a connection which I also pretend to understand.

This blissful ignorance in the real understanding behind a lot of my blind Designer Coding has been made even more enjoyable by the variety of variable names I have attributed to various movie clips and flags by making them look satisfactorily geeky by a creative use of capitals while also being clear enough that I actually remember what they’re doing such as objectIsMovingCorrectly = true and itemHasAlreadyDied = false (no abuse of those geeky variables $foo and $bar for The WebStress).

Today however I set aside my game tinkering to sink my rather oversized canines (which I can only assume is down to a combination of having no front bite due to excessive thumb-sucking in my youth, and a distinct lack of meat-tearing from my diet, so all food breakage is done well in the realms of the back of my mouth but has left me rather paranoid about my vampire-esque smile) into something a little more visually challenging.

I have been given the web designers dream.

We all long for it to some degree, that portfolio piece that doesn’t sink into the realms of client pleasing half way through after they’ve asked you to add a big yellow flashing box over your lovingly developed header, that chance to make your mark on the client and, in my case, may allow my boss to entertain the notion that perhaps I am actually a good designer and, okay I’m not asking for a retraction of the description that I’m not ‘pixel perfect’ but maybe that I am a bit more capable than crap, that opportunity to develop a flagship for the company and not just make amends to designs previously conceived by far more talented designers, that taste of what its like to be an artist.

And I was given it. They asked me to do it. I offered to take work off of another far more talented designer (who at least I can smugly say doesn’t know how to achieve the heady heights of developing multidimensional arrays in Flash, and who probably will never have a need to) in order for them to have a stab. But no, they said I could do it (although I may have heard a falter in their voice at this point, I admittedly didn’t give them a particularly large gap of silence in order to convey any concerns).

So I started to design.

This is where things went not hopelessly terribly but not exactly right either.

At least I had a starting point. I wasn’t doing this completely blind; I was essentially reassembling and rehashing some pre-existing print assets, as with most projects. As a web designer I have spent the last five years telling people that, no, I didn’t create the characters/logo/colour scheme/style but that I did make the eyes blink/make the rollover using only W3C compliant CSS/chose that specific combination of predetermined colours/decide on the web safe font from the pitiful few we are permitted to use online, by which point the previously interested person has either wandered off, has completely forgotten that it is not generally considered polite to actually roll their eyes or look actively disappointed or started talking about something else.

But considering that I am not actually particularly any good at coming up with a unique style of my own when abandoned with a blank canvas and merely an idea to go on (hence why my portfolio is continually severely neglected or discarded half way through development), I don’t resent being more of an assembler than a designer. I would like to think that I generally have a good method of assembly, and am able to deftly move items around the screen into a pleasing layout that almost always isn’t totally discarded by the client instantly.

But there was one problem with this brief: I have to produce one design for display to the client by Thursday. And this time I can’t go for the usual WebStress technique of bombarding the client with so many half baked design ideas that they are so overwhelmed and overlook the fact that they’re not actually any good. They’ve told me that I actually have to make this bloody good. The words ‘wow factor’ were actually uttered. I have one shot to melt the client’s heart of ice, I have one go at making their eyes light up with the fires of expanding budgets. And I have to complete it by tomorrow afternoon.

I have the essence of guilt wrapping itself around my fingers as I write. I had that same essence curling around my thoughts as I tried to break the creative restrictions that involve everything being in various shades of blue and think outside the box. I wanted to think like another designer in order to do this project. I wanted to think like another designer I work with. But the doubt intertwined itself with the guilt until I had to make numerous cups of tea to try and drown their distraction with caffeine. However was there, I knew it was. It still is.

Maybe, it goes, maybe I’m not the right person for this job. Maybe I should hand it over, be the bigger person, be strong and say someone else would do it better.

But then there’s this other side, the competitive side to my character that I religiously deny exists. It’s true; I’m not in the least bit competitive at sports and happily admit defeat in any sort of quiz. But this is mainly because I know I am terrible at all sports and anything that involves any retention of factual based information. But when it comes to something I want to be good at, now that’s a different matter. I don’t want or need to be the best. I just don’t want to be average, not at something certainly that I do every day, not at something creative. I have accepted, if somewhat sporadically, that is exactly what I am as a singer, I hit all the right notes and often in the right order (although not always guaranteed and not if it is outside of the single octave that I am comfortable warbling within), but there’s not exactly much of a flare there. But I don’t sing every day. I am not paid to sing (which is probably just as well). I am paid to design, and I am paid to design well and that is what I desperately want to be able to do.

I have asked this other designer for some advice, once I have finished the initial mock up. I am unsure of how honest they will be or how much feedback they will give, but at least I will be able to vaguely satisfy the cantankerous side of my character that is protesting against my stubbornness to just try to see if I can do this, if I can achieve what they want me to.

I am not convinced though. One day maybe I’ll achieve that holy grail of criticism acceptance in a trade off for being a better designer. But tomorrow I shall probably just try and arrange the assets in a slightly different order than I might normally.