How the other half designs

Last night I announced that I was going to buy a copy of Computer Arts at the train station.

This was a brave step into the world of ‘if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em’. After my general whitterings the other day on being a generally crap designer, I thought it was about time I injected my tired fingers and staid ideas with the collagen of fresh talent leached from those with real creative genius flowing effortlessly through their veins. Jealousy is unbecoming, self depreciation even more so, both of which I harbour in abundance yet so rarely do anything about.

Yesterday, I began to design for a new freelance client. I sat, searching aimlessly for competitor websites that may give me an insight, a taste, an idea, an element, something, just something, to inspire the cells in my brain to start quivering excitedly. Unfortunately the area in which I am currently developing a website for, the competitors are non existent or appear to have been designed by someone facing the opposite way to the computer screen. Nevertheless I pursued and eventually created the basis for three passable design ideas. They weren’t going to set the world on fire, but then I imagine in the area I am designing for that is probably the least of their priorities.

I left the designs to rest and settle, to be attacked later in the week, to tweak and butcher, to pull apart, to ridicule and adjust and felt moderately content with progress. Such bland words, such middle of the road design, the Dido approach web design. Inoffensive, passive and unproblematic. Functional and practical.
There is, of course, a time and a place for such design, and this project is typically one of those areas. I am a big champion for designing for content, for real life scenarios, for users, for readers, for people, for the conveying of information, the supporting of understanding, allowing the subject matter to express itself without being constricted and suffocated by egotistical melodramatic web design.

But I had what I felt might be the inkling of a hunger, the need for input, the desire to learn, to feed, to know how they do it, those designers, those great Photoshop and Flash gurus, those people who slip into applications and flourish, rather than spend ages trying to remember how to change a certain setting and then losing all their work by trying to action too many commands at once and causing the application to take charge and decide the best thing to do in this scenario is produce white space where panels once were as a warning and a lesson.

After paying the heart-stoppingly costly price of six pounds for a depressingly thin 114 pages (the price is hidden on the back, ashamed of the money it is bleeding from its customer), I sat down on the train, deciding to read the whole thing cover to cover to ensure I gained my money’s worth, or at least something vaguely near.

Things did not start off well. On the very first page describing the cover artist, within the first paragraph no less, I read the words “At the ripe old age of 25…”. This, obviously, may have been sarcasm. However, the damage had already been done. 25. The same age as me. Needless to say, reading his credentials and experience, I felt my own already fragile design ego shrivelling to resemble an unappetising and unsubstantial prune that’s only use would have been to help the elderly move their bowels.

Computer Arts is a beautiful magazine. There isn’t, to be honest, an awful lot in it. A substantial amount is tutorials, or adverts, or information on what is contained on the attached CD. But what it does is sell an ideal, a lifestyle, a dream. How the other half lives. Computer Arts to me is much like the Hello of the design world. Instead of being able to walk around the overblown homes of the disgustingly rich and surprisingly un-famous celebrities, it allows you to see into the beautiful minds of the young and inspired. One featured artist was 17 years old and fitting in freelancing around his studies. Others, my age, have a worryingly extensive back catalogue of experience, portfolios dripping with style and elegance, breathing beauty in whatever way they perceive it. One quote from such a 25 year old designer read “I am very confident with my sense of style”. And so he had a right to be. Does confidence breed beautiful design, or does it emerge from creative talent? I’m not sure.

There are companies, or, even better, ‘collectives’, within the pages of Computer Arts that encompass the very essence of what I assumed was the norm, who breathe creativity, who use such beautiful words as “coherent space” when talking about their office environment instead of sweaty, noisy and overcrowded as my London office may be described.

The dream, you can’t help it, seeps in there. Computer Arts offers you a delicious taster of an alternative reality, a bite of the apple, a taste of inspiration, of creativity.

My boss, to his credit, is forever trying to generate such a creative energy within our design team. His main argument for the lack of flowering in this area is my remote position (although he rarely addresses the issue of our other designer who works abroad). He is, to a certain extent, right. If I were there perhaps myself and my junior would have long lingering lunches, debating design, brainstorming ideas and the like. But I doubt it. I was there for nearly a year before I abandoned my office location. We worked, we worked hard, and then we went home. Some days we might have a little music, or we’d keep our audio choices personal through headphones. We’d share a minimal amount of banter due to hefty workloads and sharing an office with people who were making seemingly important phone calls. But it wasn’t the epicentre of creative flow. It shared more of a likeness with a banner ad factory at times.

I can’t help but feel that my expensive purchase this morning has at least made me feel like I am a designer. I stood on the platform, inelegantly balancing a cup of coffee, a hefty rucksack and my magazine wedged within my armpit feeling like a designer. I will garnish my knees with it on the tube on my arrival into London. I may casually discard it on the desk when I arrive in work, and effortlessly drop in a few comments on this month’s issue in our meeting this afternoon. It is a terrible shame that I can’t remember names, otherwise I might be incredibly empowered to actually sound like someone who really does know what they’re talking about.

I’d better make the best of it. At £6, I think I might just linger in the shop a little longer next time and read the best bits.