As I read this quote from Mirko Humbert today I thought “Yes”, that’s it!
Your clients don’t think that you are an artist
They just think you should help them to sell more. This doesn’t mean you should give up on good design, it just means that you’ll have to be convincing when you want to bring a more artistic touch to a job. I’ve been very frustrated with this when I first got out of school, but I learned to deal with it by educating my clients.
One of the greatest sources of frustration I come across on a daily basis is derived from how clients perceive my work as a developer. I believe that they see developers as a “computer guys” or as someone who just writes code. Like Humbert relates, I try to educate my clients but I guess I just don’t do an effective job because I rarely feel like I am heard on this point. I think most folks would believe that once the task of graphic design is completed the “artistic” work is done, now hand it over to the person that chops it up and spits it out the HTML. But whether I am working on the structure of a page that displays appropriately across every major browser, creating an elegant CSS document or tying all of this code into an application framework it is the “art” of these activities that drives the creation.
Perhaps one day the technology will advance to the point where the hard work of web development is boiled down to point and click functionality, but not any time soon. So in the mean time developers will continue to hone their skills while flying under the radar as artists venting to the blogoshpere as they go.
