Friday Morning part II: The WebStress takes on web design and designers in general in a fairly random, ill thought out and totally unresearched fashion

The things I love about the web now, in my eyes, are wonderfully the antithesis of traditional web design, of what I tentatively partially qualified in and didn't actually really like.

Blogs, these wonderful time wasting, thought dumping spaces, holes in the internet plugged with reams of ideas and mind mumbles. I doubt very few blogs have been designed for anything other than to look quite nice (although instruct me if I am wrong as this is a Friday morning thought bubble and as such I have conducted absolutely zero research).

Multiplied and spawned from stylesheets, an organic production of interlinking thought strands. Pick a stylesheet, any stylesheet. Your blog will instantly look anything from readable to sugar dripping eye candy in a heartbeat. And, this is the best bit, highly optimised for search engines. Brilliant.

There are the MySpaces, the YouTubes (and, of course, wonderful Blogger). Design itself becomes organic and mutated, through hungry fingers accessing exposed stylesheets, image and video fragments, pieced together like an ever changing mood board.

A client the other day, noticing such sites were getting an *ahem* awful lot of exposure suggested we get on the user generated bandwagon and do something ‘in that vein’. Genius. I am as such today conducting research (oh how I love web design research, which, as its alter ego may appear as aimless surfing, could get many an employee in any other line of work ungraciously sacked) for such a content site, although we can't let the general public say too much, they must be engineered to say things that suit the client, that suit the site, no paragraph too long, no picture too unsightly, no unanswerable question or angry rant.

Many web designers, myself sadly included, will often wince when we look at a badly constructed site, a poorly designed monstrosity. But with user generated content I can’t help but feel that younger users are getting something that I, and my colleagues, are not, because they experiment, because they try, because they push themselves, they sit at their computers, tap, tap, tapping away, changing a colour here, a font style here, sure it ain’t pretty but see what I can do mum, why join the dots, why paint by numbers.

A rawness that budgets forbid, an excitement that a payroll quashes, those late nights tinkering, tapping, trying that having a Newfy just doesn’t allow. They have an unharnessed energy that I can about muster for a weekly pole dancing class. It flows through them, the tinkering, the tapping, the scroll-wheeling. The anticipation that they don't know exactly what they are going or want to achieve but they're going to get there, or if not, never mind, they'll start looking at porn instead.

That’s what I want (minus the porn). That’s what I want to be involved with. Maybe that is the reserve of the youth, maybe it is a state of mind that maturity or mortgages suffocate, maybe it is not my place, that I should be simply an observer, a monitorer of such bursting creativity and exploration.

I had the chance to be immersed in academia and I often regret the research I could have done, the exploration, the findings, the information, the words I could have expressed. A need to tell the world, to write, to not only know what I know but make others know it too.

I was too young to be a lecturer, but it is a regret that I can never reclaim. All I have still to my name is a BSc in something that sounds vaguely like I might have something to do with multimedia, or perhaps just media in general.

These so-called dynamic sites, these content management systems that allow clueless and impatient clients to tinker with, adding a hideous image breaking the designer’s flow, adding a bloody buggering underline on some text which isn’t a bloody buggering link, these people not wanting to learn, just counting down until they leave work to tend to their pint/child, burst frustration within me.

We are a strange mix, the web designer and the client. The web designer designs for their work to be used, yes, to be abused (which often loosely translated as to be used), no. The client wants the website to do everything it has not previously requested. The web designer grumbles, the client grumbles. Rarely, one party is moderately happy.

I recently created a MySpace page for my sister’s project. In the little time that I had, I made it as beautiful as I could figure out how to with MySpace’s crazy styles. And I thought: This is great. A designer, qualified with some vague degree in something somehow related to Web Designer, creating pages alongside everyone else. Not being driven by the need for something beautiful for your portfolio can be quite a liberating experience for a designer.

My dad told me last night of a friend at work who managed to start her own website for £30. I grumbled, saying it was probably crap. I have just won a commission for a website for around £3,000 (to do in my spare time, yes, yes, yes, I know, don’t say it). My work regularly commissions projects of upwards of £30k, and that is for something by my standards reasonably basic. Money, I have quickly learned, and how much you pay for a website isn't always in direct ratio to how good the product is. There is money for the web, not as much as there used to be, but its there, and not being harnessed altogether in the right way, all of the time.

I am trying to find something here, something that I don’t feel is all that quite right with the ethos of (and this is general) the old style web designer, or maybe just with me, something that needs to shift, something that needs to bend, or break, or crumble, or remould.

There is opportunity there, perhaps there is even something to keep me from wanting to deny all knowledge of anything to do with the web altogether and return to cleaning old people once and for all, but perhaps it isn’t in quite the way I thought.

These are just thought fragments, and noticing it is 9:20 and I have spent an hour and twenty minutes wittering, I need to get on with something productive, in the eyes of my employers at least.