creatives

This page looks at creatives.

It covers -

• introduction
• the industry
• training and recruitment
• code versus style
• architects
• boho or boo hoo?

     introduction

Successive 'new media' have been mythologised by practitioners, consumers and academic or other observers. Work with new communication technologies and business practices has been romaticised as exciting, significant, free of the constraints affecting 'industry' jobs and of course 'creative'. That romance is evident in descriptions of print and broadcast journalism, photojournalism and broadcasting. It is also evident in depictions of tools such as the typewriter (and in notions, embraced by many netizens, that mere possession of a keyboard makes you an author ... and author whose work is worth reading).

Alas, all new media have had an industrial flavour, involving capital, scheduling, market pressures and the management of labour. Much cultural production is regimented - using the model of a factory rather than the solo artist whose genius inspired romantic theories of intellectual property - with management embodying tensions between individual creativity or assertions of personal value and "the demands of the job", demands that may privilege delivery over temperament, functionality over an individual aesthetic statement.

Those tensions are apparent in much web design, particularly in commercial web design, where there are -

• disagreements about standards, certification and professional associations
• uncertainty as to whether web design is an art, a craft or a science
• disputes between 'creatives' (with an emphasis on the appearance of sites), 'engineers' (with a contrasting emphasis on code') and 'functionalists' (whose vision encompasses accessibility, aesthetics and sustainability)
• traditional laments that dealing with 'designers' is like herding cats and that managers lack vision or courage.

     industry

In considering the 'web design industry' it is tempting to echo Dr Spock: there is an industry there, Jim, but not as we know it.

Although there are standards for accessibility, in many instances adoption of those standards is not mandatory and there are few penalties for non-compliance. There are no Australian or international standards for web design as such. (Standards for software quality, as noted elsewhere in this site, are contested or simply dismissed as unachievable.) There is no formal nationally-accepted certification under government auspices; attempts in Australia to reach agreement on establishment of industry certification have been unsuccessful and are likely to remain so.

In practice anyone can call themself a web designer - recognition is dependent on acceptance by the market or peers. Many designers have a smattering of code and some familiarity with image processing software; many are unfamiliar with (or merely indifferent to) questions of accessibility.

Much work is short term, with designers being employed on a project-specific contract or subcontract basis. Most work is anonymous, with the major exception being for personal projects (typically artistic statements and often low in accessibility). Who created your favourite site - or your bank's site? Unless you have had personal contact with an individual designer or design team you are unlikely to know; much work on major sites is collaborative.

Such collaboration can restrict opportunities for the exercise of artistic temperament or fuel a spat between the 'creatives' and the coders. It often involves specialisation, with for example an image specialist generating graphics that are used by code specialists as part of displays provided from large databases (ie as illustrations or, to use the words of one project manager, as the fashionable black lipstick painted on a badtempered pig).

     code versus style

Histories of modern design, in particular of industrial design, are littered with disagreements between proponents of style and function, often expressed as a dismissive view of the designer who simply repackages an existing product with little regard for what lies underneath that new skin. Questions about 'honesty' in design - and the feasibility of fusing large scale industrial manufacturing with form and function - are evident in criticisms of figures such as Raymond Loewy, Normal Bel Geddes Henry Dreyfuss, Philippe Starck or Walter Dorwin Teague and praise for Peter Behrens, Charles Eames and peers.

     architects

What is an 'information architect'? Critics have argued that information architect is a meaningless label, one that is undefined, contested and not based on any certification or accepted training and standards.

A broader view is that adoption of the label by consultants and inhouse IT or design staff reflects a status anxiety, following commodification of web design. That commodification results from the emergence of commercial web authoring tools such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage, the inclusion of basic web design courses in secondary school curricula in many jurisdictions, corporate adoption of content management systems (CMS) and the notion that anyone can find - or indeed be - a web designer.

One Canberra-based designer, with indifferent code and image-processing skills but a fine line in blarney, thus confessed that self-characterisation as an 'information architect' impressed the clients: they can get a designer off the street (and are increasingly less respectful of temperament) but an architect is something else.

     boho or boo hoo?

Are web designers central to a new bohemia, a cultural avant-garde?

Rosalind Gill's Technobohemians or the new Cybertariat? (PDF) comments that

Accounts of new media working draw heavily on two polarised stereotypes, veering between techno-utopianism on the one hand, and a vision of web-workers as the new 'precariat', victims of neoliberal economic policies and moves to flexibilisation and insecurity on the other. Heralded from both perspectives as representing the brave new world of work what is striking is the absence of research on new media workers own experiences, particularly in a European context.

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