Featured

Design don’t come cheap. Or easy.

I am not a web designer. Shocking news, I know.

I am not a web designer, and my sense of design, color, and proportion are all vague and poorly informed. And yet even I can recognize when a given design pleases me - even if I can’t explain why. I look at sites like Subtraction, Airbag Industries, A List Apart, Daring Fireball, to name but a handful of examples, and my heart empties. Fonts are easy to read and appropriate to the theme. Colors just work, even if the only colors employed are black and white. Page elements exist in harmonious relation to one another and combine to produce a unified effect that is…authoritative, somehow. Authentic to that site, that author’s voice. What comes to my mind most readily is this description of divinity by Lord Yama in Roger Zelazny’s classic, Lord of Light.

Being a god is being able to recognize within one’s self these things that are important, and then to strike the single note that brings them into alignment with everything else that exists. Then, beyond morals or logic or esthetics, one is wind or fire, the sea, the mountains, rain, the sun or the stars, the flight of an arrow, the end of a day, the clasp of love. One rules through one’s ruling passions. Those who look upon gods then say, without even knowing their names, ‘He is Fire. She is Dance. He is Destruction. She is Love.’

Er, not equating web designers with gods. When one lacks info, one resorts to poetry. Still, the point is made.

The problem, of course, are that these sites and others like them represent the cognoscenti of the web design world. For a layperson, longing after such design is like admiring a supermodel in the distance - awesome, sure, but annoyingly unattainable.

Still and all: Goddamn, that’s nice stuff.

I want that kind of design authenticity for this blog, and with the current rendition of the layout I am ever so slightly closer to it than I have been. Not nearly close enough, though. It occurs to me that I am hardly ever satisfied.

I am reminded now that there only two paths to this level of design perfection. One of them is paved with much study and practice, and enough hours that it would feel like a second career.

The other path is paved with dollars. Thousands and thousands of dollars.

Well.

Until the piggy bank is full - or considerably more so - I have some reading to do. And some thinking, too, about voice and such.

© 2008 Philip Barron. Monitored by SiteUptime