Now, granted, a good number of my friends are artists, so that is what my ideas are informed by.

Reading this post about how artistic integrity has no place in web design, which in turn is a response to this post regarding rules for how to design web sites got my mind churning a little.

There comes, I suppose, at time in every aspiring artist’s life where they must decide to sell out and make some money, or stay true to their vision and perhaps starve, or at least end up working some really crappy, non-art related, soul-sucking job in order to pay the bills. But in an industry where part of the value is artistry, I’m not so sure selling out to the Man is the best strategy available, since we all know what sorts of monstrosities committees and corporate shills are capable of, and which they insultingly try to pass off as “art.”

You can get anyone who has ten fingers on each hand to type in HTML and CSS, but the value of a designer is inevitably their vision. Like it or not, this is what you pay for. Same thing in any high-profile design industry. Landscaping, architecture, automobile design, computers. You don’t need designers to clean up a vacant lot, put up a building, make a car, or put together a box, but they get hired to help do these things because of their vision. If you don’t want vision, why the hell are you hiring a designer? I’m sure it would be ultimately cheaper for you to learn some rudimentary HTML and CSS and do it yourself. Or use some free, open-source software to simply point and click and get your site running. Many of the better hosting solutions have these thing in place. Or even buy some proprietary package to run your generic shopping-cart site on.

My thoughts then stray to the impending 30th birthday of Apple. The Times Online recaps Apple’s rollercoaster history. The article brings up the idea of artistic vision and its value and alludes to the idea that this is the secret behind Apple’s ability to survive as a company and actual make money. As Macheads are wont to say, Apple doesn’t just sell a computer, they sell an experience. It is innately human to be moved by beauty, and I think this is what motivates many people who buy Macs. Realistically, the technology itself is really not very advanced (although I suppose with the new Macs running on Intel, this is changing), and while I do think the user interface is superior to Windows, this would probably not be enough to motivate people to buy Apple over a no-name Windows/x86 box.

I think something similar occurs with regards to cars. I mean, do you think Porsche and Ferrari would even still be in business if they simply concerned themselves with making the fastest cars possible, damn aesthetics? Or if they just made normal cars, not these high-end machines that they create? Design matters, and design requires vision. Simple as that.

But, my point: don’t sell out. Especially in a completely virtual world like the web where everything can be disassembled, cut and paste, moved and copied here and there, as a site designer, you don’t really offer anything unique except for you vision. That is, in my mind, your only salable commodity. You can teach a 9 year old to code in HTML and CSS, but there’s absolutely no way to teach vision.