I’m on vacation! Two days of it, anyway, since I can’t take any blocks of time off. As you all know after reading my constant moaning about it, I’ve become less-than-enchanted lately with my job. It may not be this particular job that I’m sick of, actually, but web design/web development/information architecture in general (pick the wanky title of your choice). I’m tired.
The ecommerce site that I work on started out as a reasonably clean (hybrid CSS and table – tables being used only where forced to) design. Things began going awry when the developers for the ecommerce software that we bought began re-coding things only from the screenshots, ignoring my carefully-coded templates. Nested tables, etc. I was able to clean some of it up, but a lot of it remains. The rest of the mess happened in top management meetings, where it was decided that what the site needed was a lot of crappy graphics: graphics for all buttons, rather than CSS-styled links. There has been talk of graphics for all navigation, showing pretty pictures of product that change on rollover. No one has yet mentioned animated gifs and background tiles, but I know that it is only a matter of time.
Why did you hire me if you won’t listen to anything I say? If the CEO and the retail marketing people know so much more than I do, let them do my job. I don’t need to be here.
I will revise my CV this week and re-post it. The trouble is, I know that it won’t be any different in another company. it will always be design-by-committee (“The marketing firm in London, who do all of our print material, think it should be done like this.” “Well, if this was a print ad, then they may have a point. On the web, this is really going to suck.” “We pay them £200k a year to advise us on these things.” “Well, then me and my pathetic salary will just shut up.”) *sigh*
Trouble is, I do love this…I just hate all the crap that goes along with it. Also, if I did something different…what would I do? More importantly, how could I live without the money?
And where’s my goddamn Magic 8-Ball when I need it?
I challenge you to do something pro-active. bring a tennis racket to work and a potato and when no one is looking during a meeting, put the potato on the table and stand up and FUCKING WHACK the hell out of that potato and tell them that this is what you feel like and that you want to have more creative design in your work…
or at least you could *dream* of doing that and wake up with a smile ;)
Hahaha…I love it. I’ll never do it, of course, but I love the thought of what everyone’s face would look like. :)