I was amused to read an article interviewing Brian Clough in the Sun - great "when I were a lad" outrage at "players today", but right on the money. As a taste, there's a great bit about Van Gogh:

No wonder Van Gogh cut off his ear. He spent years trying to sell masterpiece paintings. If he was still alive and seeing what we're seeing in football, he would cut off his head!

Good design?

I've been thinking about something I read in an article about designing web-pages professionally by Robbie Shepherd in A List Apart.

He talks about the situation where a web-designer makes a site for a client, who then doesn't like it and wants to change it. I quote:

"Maybe it's because the perception among the wider public is that "anyone" can make a website. And they're right. Anyone can make a website - but not everyone can make an emotionally engaging interactive experience that will live in the visitor's memory. (Similarly, anyone with access to a photocopier and a stapler can "make a book," but good books are scarce.)

Branding creates value, but most clients seek quantifiable results, and few sites (aside from successful e-commerce sites) deliver measurable bottom-line results. Our work is aesthetic, but most clients are not trained in aesthetics. What I consider ugly, they may view as perfectly acceptable. When commissioned to deliver a branding site, I'm asking my client to have faith that my team and I understand branding, aesthetics, content, communications, and user flow - most of which are subjective and beyond the client's realm of expertise."

The trouble with this is it raises the question of who is to be the judge of quality in web design. This question stems from the fact that elements of web design are essentially art.

In the mainstream arts the client is the public. It is the public who appreciates the work and who is ultimately paying for it. So it is unsurprising that ordinary members of the public feel entitled to have an opinion, despite in many cases not having any formal artistic education. Because artistic appreciation IS subjective, people do not feel that it should be left to the "experts" in the same way as they would for advanced bio-chemistry. Yes, education may lead to a more reasoned appreciation, imbuing a critique with a sense of history and context, and perhaps an understanding of underlying technique. But it cannot bestow ultimate legitimacy upon any particular view or render any judgment definitive. In the arts, the fact that you just don't like a work (or you just do) may be an acceptable critical viewpoint.

Commercial web design also embraces less 'artistic' disciplines. A site must be useable enough to communicate the client's message. It must build the client's brand and promote the client's product effectively. These issues may border pseudo-scientific areas where a trained marketing/design professional can profess some objective legitimacy, but even these factors will merely serve as guides in the exercise of a broad, creative, subjective discretion. If the client, or any member of the public, just doesn't LIKE the finished site, who is to say they are wrong in that view?

This discussion leaves open the question of what is 'good' web design. This is as difficult to answer as what is 'good' art. There are two extremes. First, the proposition that the best is that which appeals to the largest number of people. The danger here is that 'good' is diluted into the inoffensive, easy-listening, lowest common denominator. At the other extreme, the best is what those "trained in aesthetics" who "understand content, communications, and user flow - most of which are subjective and beyond the client's[and the general public's] realm of expertise" adjudge worthy. This proposition brings with it the spectre of intellectual elitism and design snobbery, and will lead to cutting-edge sites that no-one without a PhD can understand. And of course, these much vaunted web-design professionals have taken, and will continue to take, pretty horrendous wrong-turns in exercising their educated judgments. So the determination of quality in design rests neither on a universal referendum nor on an elite panel of self-appointed experts.

So; what is good design? - it will depend upon, among other things, the project, the audience and the client in each case. A web-site is a subjective experience. Every viewer will have an opinion and is entitled to have one. It is obvious that a designer cannot work in isolation from the client's team, and will have to be sensitive in putting his views across to a client who has less formal knowledge and experience in the field. However good a designer may be, no amount of education, experience or talent can make someone definitively right in a subjective area. And ultimately, as Robbie Shepherd recognises, he who pays the piper, calls the tune.

The golf game that people were sending around a while back with 9 holes now has 17, with the 18th still pending. It is SO easy to waste time playing this...

Finally a regulatory body to tackle the filth that may be found on the Internet. It appears they are self-appointed, but in the absence of any action by world governments or the United Nations, it was about time someone took this matter in hand. I wonder if they have a Data Protection Act in America? [via Zeldman]

On a lighter note; amazing what they get up to in Europe - Madonna ticket in exchange for sex with a female web-site columnist. Wonder whether she was fit....?

Speeding - a victimless crime?

So David Blunkett is saying that police should spend less time chasing motorists and more catching drug dealers. It's interesting that motoring organisations are said to have given the news "a cautious welcome". It is illegal to break the speed limit and the police are there to enforce the law. So in effect they are welcoming the potential opportunity to break the law of the land without being caught for it - an interesting jurisprudential position for a responsible interest group to adopt. The point is that finite resources have to be allocated in the enforcement of the various criminal prohibitions. Therefore it would seem more appropriate for bodies involved in the rehabilitation of drug addicts or burglary victim support groups to "welcome" this, since they represent the beneficiaries of the proposed re-allocation of police priorities - i.e the victims of the types of crime that the police are to devote more time to preventing. In fact, this debate reveals the very different attitude held by the population towards road-traffic offences as distinct from other crimes. Many people really do not believe there is anything morally wrong with breaking the law on speeding. Imagine if instead Blunkett had said the police were going to crack down hard on speeding - "the Columbian cartels, the major east-end crime families and the inhabitants of Feltham young offenders institution gave the news a cautious welcome"....... doesn't sound quite right does it. What we are left with is the RAC, BMF and the Institute of Advanced Motorists being akin to criminal interest groups. So speed limits should either be changed to levels which have the support of the population or more resources should be devoted to convincing people that it really is morally wrong to speed, backed up with evidence that the speed limits are set as they are for sound reasons - witness the change in attitude towards getting in the motor after 6 or 8 pints - 40 years ago a bit of a laugh, these days an irresponsible and criminally stupid act. If this does not take place, enforcement of speed limits is looking increasingly like an unreasonable encroachment on the freedom of drivers for the main purpose of raising revenue for the state.

Still in Paris - just zipped into Easy Everything up by the Forum des Halles on Bvd Sebastapol as I was passing. I'm feeling a bit fragile after tooling into the hotel at 5am having had a great meal in the Fermette Marbeuf, followed by many beers (including Duvels, Sharks!) in various bars before a couple of hours failing to get into any cool clubs, on account of being a bunch of badly dressed English lads who have had too much to drink. We finally settled for the uncool bar round the corner from the hotel. Just like London here ain't it? The search for bars took us through a couple of bars that you couldn't see into from the street ('Bar Club' Venus being one of them, Nick, next time you're over here) where the only people present other than ourselves were several very large gentlemen who didn't appear to be drinking and for some reason looked rather serious and about 10 scantily clad, bad-looking women sitting around drinking "champagne". When we found out that beers were 16 quid, we decided that maybe we didn't fancy buying any "champagne" for any of the females present. It doesn't only happen in Soho, eh. Bloody tourists.

Hey I'm in Paris on a conference with work! Hope you guys are doing OK back in England. This is posted from a computer that is lying around in France Telecom which I am cheekily blagging use of while no-one's watching!!

When I built this site, I took the view that I'd just do it standards-compliant and I wouldn't mess about making it work in all the old browsers because the target audience, my friends, would all have browsers that could cope with that approach. It turns out this was a pious hope - someone complained that the navigation bar was obscuring the text; the reason - he's using Explorer 4 at the office. So a rethink may be necessary. Argh. I'll get back to you on this when I've decided how to deal with it - i.e do I rewrite the whole thing using tables or adopt a more aggressive approach and just tell people to sort their damn browser out, and until they do they can basically suck it up how ever it comes out.

I'm on a bit of a slang tip after making the Cockney translator. Here's another one you might like. It translates sites into Clueless style Cali slang and at the moment I think it's like, totally quite amusing.

Hello, this is a first test posting to see if my web log on this site is working smoothly. I am not proposing to adopt any particular schedule to updating this - it isn't going to be the wisdom of Solomon or the diary of Adrian Mole. It's just going to be a quick, topical (or not) comment or two, whenever I feel like it.