But I digress. I’m a lefty, I believe in social justice (whatever that means), and yet I’m not wailing in the streets this morning, rending cloth and gnashing teeth.

Did I miss the memo? The Tories are coming! THE TORIES ARE COMING!

Well, no. I didn’t miss the memo. For one thing, it’s raining today, so I’m not going out unless I really have to, and for the other, well, I’m a little confused as to what we’re wailing about.

Oh, right. We’re headed back to the eighties. Fire up the Quattro and all that. Well, forgive me for not quite getting bent out of shape just yet. Here’s why:

Cause / Effect

We got the eighties because we had the seventies. Everyone hates Thatcher for smashing the unions, but what, exactly, was the alternative? Everyone hates Thatcher for ruthlessly privatising everything, but what, exactly, was the alternative?

This isn’t a post to praise Thatcher, not by a long shot. I mean to bury her, and perhaps even bury the spectre of her. Many of the problems she’s blamed for were the result of having to fix problems started by Labour mismanagement in the seventies. Yes, she was equally guilty of fucking things up, but run a little thought experiment: imagine the eighties under Callaghan. Now imagine the nineties after Callaghan.

It’s as easy to point to Thatcher’s Tories as evil because of what happened to this country in the eighties as it is to point to Blair’s Labour as wonderful because he inherited a country with a stable economy at the height of the dotcom boom, and had Liam Gallagher round for tea. We’re now in a situation where the country’s screwed, thanks to Brown’s handling of the economy and security, rapidly heading towards a police state, where graduates are unemployable and in massive debt, where using the internet is soon to be a crime, where we engaged in a war of aggression, colluded with war criminals, hounded out nay sayers, and bulldozed opposition in parliament because of a massive incumbent majority.

And we’re still talking about “short memories” because of Thatcher.

Balance

The argument against the Tories seems to be “anyone but the Tories”. How constructive. Whom? A party that, as it stands, is guilty of incompetence? An unproven party that has never taken power? Or a party that hasn’t been in power for over a decade, has (perhaps, perhaps not) changed since then?

Or is there an alternative?

What this country needs, more than anything, is balance, conversation, discussion and progression. What we have now is partisan, us and them bullshit threatening to drown out the point that something new is happening here: we have a coalition government, and one with a razor thin majority. Yes, it’s the Tories in power, but it’s the Tories relying on co-operation with the centre. We have Labour in opposition, and it’s Labour relying on co-operation to do their job of opposing.

In short, we have a potential parliament again: somewhere where bills may actually be debated and voted on an individual basis, not rammed through on whim *cough*DEBill*cough*. We have a parliament where our MPs might actually show up, because they might actually make a difference if they do.

We have the Tories in power, but a potentially powerful watchdog.

What if

So what alternatives were there? Clegg could have told Cameron and Brown where to go. Strategically, I’d have liked this. I’d have preferred Cameron attempting a minority government. It would have crashed and burned, and we’d have a general election in six months. In my little fantasy (indulge me), Clegg would have come out of the negotiations squeaky clean, having not compromised his principles, Labour would be adrift and unelectable after 13 years of mismanagement, the Tories would have very recently, very publicly fucked up after only six months, and Clegg would win in a landslide.

That option is still open to Clegg, but it’s unlikely to happen. The Liberals’ hold on the media has never been strong. He’d be painted as a modern-day Hamlet as fast as possible by both sides, and we’d get another minority result with the blame squarely on his shoulders in the public eye.

So he compromised. Get used to it. That’s what is hopefully going to dominate this government. Compromise. It’s what this country desperately needs, and it’s something we’ve never tried before. I could be wrong, the Tories may still be evil, and in twelve months we may be begging for mercy. But make no mistake, life under a continued Labour government was getting worse, and had to end. Five more years of Brown would have been five more years of criminality, public bailouts of private fuck ups, increased surveillance, hyper inflation and darkness. The 2010s are coming, regardless of who’s in power. We can’t afford “business as usual”, regardless of who’s in Number 10.

And if nothing else, this election was a ringing condemnation of “business as usual”.

One of my favourite places to visit in Glasgow when I was a teen was the Gallery of Modern Art, which I’m actually rather depressed about not having a website of its own. Maybe I should drop them an email…

Anyway, the point of this article isn’t to eviscerate art. It’s to eviscerate artists who pretend that they’re designers.

You heard me right. Eviscerate.

Design and art are creative. They require time, talent, an eye for aesthetic, for balance, and an understanding of the audience. They both generally exist to convey a message, and are both judged on their ability to convey that message.

But they’re completely different.

I said recently that, if there is some part of your “design” that I can’t argue with, then it’s not “design”, it’s art. I mean to expand on that a little.

But is it art?

Art is design minus accountability. it’s as simple as that. If your work answers only to you, to your muse, your whim, your own direction, then it’s art.

Design has much more of a load to bear. Design is directed creativity, where that direction comes from outside the creator. It’s art that you have to justify, and you have to justify with reason, not just with “but I like that bit”.

This reminds me of some advice I was given at school by one of my English teachers. She said, quite simply, “Kill your darlings”. This was in reference to short stories and essays, to creative work and also to critical work. I took the advice and my grades soared, but it took me a while to understand why.

Your overconfidence is your weakness

The weakest parts of your work are the bits you love. Having an emotional attachment to your work is fine. The bits that you “love“, though, are the bits you’ve lost the ability to be rational about. They’re the bits you’ll defend, the bits that, when the client hates them, will cause you to get offended and become bitter.

They’re the bits that stop you from being a designer.

Every designer’s job is to answer questions. The client asks us to achieve something, and we have to answer. How we respond is where we get to be creative, but if our work doesn’t answer the questions, we’ve failed, regardless of how beautiful it is.

So, every part of your design work must be open to challenge, to interrogation. If you’re unwilling to throw any part of your work out (given, of course, a cogent argument compelling you to do so), then you’re not designing. You’re painting, you’re putting your pleasure above your client’s, and you’re failing as a designer.

There’s a little bit of the darkness inside us all

I’m not saying this from an ivory tower. I’m saying this having produced work that falls into this category, both graphic design and code. I’ve been proud of things that have no place in designs, have no place in the medium I’ve chosen, and have been devastated when they’ve been (rightly) rejected.

I’m aware of my limitations as a designer, and would never call myself one. I play at design, I don’t work at it, and if challenged, I’d rather employ a designer than produce my own work.

What galls me is when designers don’t understand their own limitations, and produce work with no understanding of the questions being asked, no appreciation of the “why”. This is disappointing, frustrating and dangerous.

Wait, “dangerous”?

Yes, dangerous. Dangerous to my time and their health.

All web developers have, at one time or another, received artwork produced by “designers” with no understanding of the medium. The work has never been given any consideration other than “something pretty I once saw on a flash website”, and provides no direction on user interaction, accessibility, or anything else that constitutes what “works” on the web.

It would be like me calling myself a graphic designer, then producing some animation for the billboard poster I was commissioned to create.

This isn’t design. This isn’t useful. It’s masturbation, and it must stop.

Okay, calm down

Phew. What’s the real problem, here? The real problem is usually one of a “designer” being pulled out of their ability zone. I touched on this in From the gut:

Suddenly, I’m a sales and business development advisor, and friends, I suck at sales and business development.

To couch that in this context, in that situation I’m suddenly a business development artist. I’m saying or doing things that feel right, but which may or may not have any basis in reality.

Such is the fate of the graphic designer who says—or who is volunteered into saying—that they can produce web design.

The thinking is usually “I can draw pictures—how hard can it be?”.

If you agree with that, ask yourself if you’d be happy employing a cashier as your accountant. They “work with numbers”, so how hard can it be?

The tax man tends to frown on “artistic” accountancy.

So you’re saying that design is hard, art is easy?

Not at all—I’m saying they’re utterly different beasts, and to ignore that is to diminish both.

I said before that art was design without the accountability, implying that art is design where the only person you have to please is yourself. That’s true, but if you think that makes it easier, ask yourself how easy, quick and painless your last blog redesign was, or how far through that novel you are.

Art is hard. Art is very hard, because everyone’s toughest audience is themselves.

Design is easy: all we have to do is what the client asks. Regardless of how much better it would look if we could ignore the constraints of the medium.

I’m 30, and I find minimalism in most things very calming. I like tidy desks, obsess over tidy discs, find peace in ordered minds and making invisible the repetitive.

I even subscribe to Minimal Mac, and used to read Zen Habits religiously.

And yet, my house is full of crap. Full of it. Everywhere I look, my house has stuff in it that I don’t use, don’t need, and actually, when I think about it, don’t even want.

I like the idea of a bookcase full of books, but really, what’s the point? I don’t use books as reference any more, and the ones that I do use that way are all duplicated as PDFs in the cloud.

Similarly, I have a load of DVDs. How many do I really want immediate access to? More to the point, how many can I realistically watch at any one time?

When all you have is a hammer…

I’m a web developer, which is to say I’m a software engineer of sorts, which is to say that I take information retrieval problems, and couch them in interfaces that are, hopefully, a joy to use.

What I have here is a retrieval problem. My house, if you like, is like a server. It stores my stuff, and I can retrieve it whenever I like. Right now, my server is full of crap. It needs cleared out. Moreover, the interface to most of my crap is even worse than the crap it’s hiding. The vast, vast majority of my stuff exists piled, randomly, in boxes and cupboards.

In terms of any sort of information architecture, my house is the equivalent of a bad Infocom-knockoff adventure game. Do I know where that power brick for my old router is? Sure, it’s in the box in the cupboard in the hall, under three other boxes and behind the stepladder. The box itself contains maybe fifty power bricks, miles of Cat 5 string, and, if I’m honest, probably not the brick I’m after. That might be in the other box of cables in the airing cupboard in our spare room.

At this point, I’m seriously tempted to go to Maplin and just pick up a new one. But I don’t want to. I know I’ve got that power brick in here somewhere.

If everything’s special, nothing is

Why did I keep that power brick? I kept it because I hate throwing stuff out. I’m convinced I can reuse and recycle stuff, because that seems moral.

And it is, but “reuse” is an interesting term. Reusing is great, but do I have to reuse it for it to count? And look what’s happened: I have no concrete idea where that power brick is. Why? Because while I want to reuse, I have no infrastructure for managing it.

I’m kidding myself on that this is efficient.

Back to web servers: I’m sitting on a single, old, small, creaky server, and trying to run YouTube from it.

More boxes!

So, how does this problem get solved? First attempt is to organise and box the stuff all up. Hey, it worked for Google, right? More boxes!

So I get more boxes. But still, I have no plan. There’s still no interface for finding any of this junk. Do I really want to start indexing up which of 20 possible boxes my copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is in?

I’m not in the business of building a stuff network. I mean, I could do it, but what’s the point?

When in doubt, buy it in

There already is a stuff retrieval network that works perfectly. I can get anything I want pretty fast, it has a search engine, a wonderful delivery network, and is reasonably priced for what I’d use it for. I’m talking, of course, about Amazon.

I can search for what I want, and it’s in my hands in 24 hours. Why am I storing all my DVDs? Let Amazon’s warehouses store them, then I can just pay the £5 “retrieval” fee when I want to watch a movie. It takes a little bit of planning, yes, but when you’re a dad, everything takes a little bit of planning, so I can live with that.

Where I really want to watch a movie or listen to music right now, I’ve got spotify and iTunes. Everything else? Amazon’s probably got me covered.

Bu-WHU?

“But wait!”, you say, “you said you wanted to get rid of stuff! How does this help?”

Cool your boots, man: this is only half of the solution. The other half? Gumtree or, if you prefer, eBay. Once I’m done with that DVD? I sell it. In effect, I’m just putting it “back” into storage, and what’s better is I get paid to do it!

Let’s get concrete again:

• I buy a DVD from Amazon for £10
• I watch it, enjoy it, and put it on Gumtree for a week at £8 (along with a batch of others to sweeten the deal, say)
• If I sell it, I’ve spent £2 “renting” the DVD. If I want to watch it again, wash rinse repeat, except this time, I maybe get it second hand for £5.

So far, I’m out £7 on a £10 DVD. And if I flog it again for £2 (say to a second hand store, again with a batch of them), I’m only out £5.

At that point, the question is “Why even buy? Why not just rent?”. Now we’re getting somewhere.

There’s a whole network of storage systems for my stuff: Libraries, LoveFilm, City Car Club. Hell, why do I own a DSLR? I should rent one when I need it. Same with lenses.

For the stuff I can’t rent? Say that powerbrick? Why the hell am I keeping it? Why isn’t it being recycled?

So what’s the next step?

Right now, everything I own is for sale. I’m probably going to lob a page up here of stuff I actually want to shift, but seriously, I don’t actually own anything any more. It’s all yours: I’m just storing it for you.

If you want to know the retrieval fee, just ask me.