i hate webdesign

just finished (actually not yet...) "designing" and developing a website. actually re-re-almost-designing it.

but this is not about a site. it's a about how 90% percent of people are completely incapable of discerning beauty from shear ugliness. ...this sounds wrong for you too, doesn't it?

if it does, it means you're not an artist. I'm not. I never pretended to be. the thing with persons who consider themselves as having the gift of understanding art (I say "consider themselves" because I don't consider there is such thing as "understanding" art, at least in the sense people normally use the verb "understand"), is that they also expect others to have it, and they are really amazed by their total lack of it.

back to the main story: after uploading a test version and mailing the link to the persons who should like it or not (no, I won't post a link on this blog!), I started to receive some pretty weird answers. it turned out they all said they like it. regardless of the weirdness of having your work "appreciated" in a non-profit, non-competitive context, where people should, in principle, be free to say what's on their minds but they don't, the weirdness of the situation was that they liked it. I didn't "LIKED" it!! but I knew it was fit for the job. I knew I invested just the right amount of effort, not more not less, for this particular task.

after almost settling with the thought that is must look pretty good, I finally received "feedback" from someone with more artistic intuition than me: it sucks! (not in these words, but...).

the point:
(a) people don't say what they think, unless they have some specific interest in doing so. they just adapt their words to the current context of self and group interests.
(b) trying to make something "beautiful" is waste of time. something "kind of ugly but sort of better that what they've seen before and presumably functional" has just the same impression. ofcourse, my goal for this project was to make things work and learn something in the process.
(c) i hate webdesign (oh, and no, not because of what I've just said... it actually has nothing to do with it...)

[edit: the bloody site was actually redesigned by somone else... glaaaaaad!]