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Instant Coffee

by James McGoram

There was a time, and god knows it’s receding quickly, when I thought I could master design. I thought this way about a lot of things. It’s a contagion of youth, the earnest desire to be better at something than anyone has ever being, to seek new frontiers and map them for the human soul. You realise as you mature that there are some things in life you’ll never master, such as, for instance, the espresso machine that you bought last year. It lurks on the kitchen counter-top of your ostentatious studio, silently mocking your ineptitude.

Forgive my turn of phrase, because, after all, it’s my ostentatious studio we’re talking about, and despite the damned espresso machine, I kind of like it.

The espresso machine, however, is part of a plan. That plan, of course, is to make the studio look like the kind of place where fired-up designers get on with serious design, while drinking serious coffee from a serious piece of German engineering. Shit yeah. At that, it functions superbly. If you want a coffee however, there’s a guy with a stall about 50 metres down the road that will do a much better job.

Website design is what I’m meant to be doing, as I gaze at the steam indicator on this edifice to my pretension. I watch it, once more, issue a series of sluggish spurts, and I muse about the fact that after nine years in the business I’m not the world’s best website designer. The idea forms in my head without dazzle or fanfare. It’s a slow and, depressingly, not wholly un-expected realisation.

Make no mistake, I do believe that I’m good. I believe in my studio and the ability of my team. We do work that we can really be proud of. But I know that our work is not perfect.

I complete this thought on my way to see Jeremy, the barrista down the road. He’s a lean young guy with a beard, a sort of espresso ascetic. If anyone has perfected his art, surely it’s Jeremy.

I work in an industry that has it’s high priests, and it’s monkish devotees of purity, but let’s not forget, too, the lowly footsoldiers. Freelancers and hacks that churn out sloppy graphics, copy-and-paste coders slapping together fragile towers of code that won’t survive the next browser upgrade, those that are careless, inept or simply so cheap they can’t afford to spend time on the details. It strikes me that much of our literature, magazines and websites ignores this great, heaving mass of designers, and yet it is the bulk of what the rest of society experiences of us.

“Jeremy,” I ask, “you ever drink at Starbucks?”

“You ever drink out of the toilet bowl?” he quips.

“Yeah, well no, but, I guess what I’m saying is, like, a hundred million people enjoy starbucks everyday. Ever thought there was something in that?”

He looks at me for a second. It feels like a month, his irises like two over-roasted beans. He shrugs, breaking the spell, and hands me the long black. I figure he’s said all he’s going to say on the subject. He strokes his beard, grabs a cloth and starts cleaning his machine. I stoop out the door and head back to the studio.

I realise then that we are all of us, with the exception perhaps of Jeremy, churning out mediocrity on the regular. No, no, no. Don’t object about this. I know it and you know it. We hide it away when new clients come around and we never talk about it at design meetups, but we all know it’s there. It gnaws away at us during the middle of the night as we dream of the day when every pixel we touch sparkles like gold, when no function ever throws an exception, when our page generation times approach 0.

But even the best designers have their off days. We just choose not to include them in our portfolios. Designers are wonderful self-editors, and we design not only for our clients but also, to paraphrase somebody wiser than me, to remake ourselves in a semblance of something more brilliant.

But what is the truth of the matter, really? What is our industry actually producing? After all of the self-congratulations of Awards Ceremonies and cocktail evenings, how do our clients feel, the ones that didn’t get the award-winning website? After all, there are far many more losers than winners.

You’d be forgiven at this point for thinking I’ve simply had a little too much espresso, and have embarked upon some ill-advised and public, caffeine-fueled soul-searching. By the number of adjectives in that last sentence, maybe I have. But I do have a point.

It’s about ugly websites. Ugly code, ugly design and copy, and often times, downright ugly products. Websites that are nevertheless hugely successful, websites that sell, websites that rank highly in search engines, websites that make their owners happy. It’s about redefining what we believe to be good design, about suggesting, somewhat tentatively, that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing. It’s about accepting that a judgement about what really is good design is usually made by somebody outside of design. Perhaps by the guy drinking coffee at Starbucks.