Someday I need to make a showcase of all the rejected mockups I’ve made for my employer’s clients. My showcase would prob’ly be a thousand times more creative and intriguing than the ugly, counter-intuitive designs that these clients finally approve for their sites.

I don’t blame the clients entirely for their poor knowledge of the internet, the web, and graphic design in general. After all, not everyone knows that green and red only match at Christmas. The problem I have is that the clients are stubborn. They refuse to trust my design skills in a field they truly know nothing about.

Now, this is not true of all the clients. Many of them acknowledge my skills as a designer, problem-solver, and overall internet know-it-all. They say, “You do this every day, so be creative and give me something my customers will like.” Also, a good amount actually do have their own graphic designers or art directors who can give me quality mockups or ideas for their sites.

The stubborn, design-impaired clients are in the majority, however, and on the optimistic side, they are forcing me to provide myself with a massive archive of rejected mockups.

I have designed beautiful, state-of-the-art, easy-to-navigate web sites for many clients who have turned right around and ordered me to remove the navigation, change the colors to ones that clash, turn on all the table borders, and add blinking/scrolling text.

Fortunately I still have copies of those pages (and/or PhotoShop mockups) with understandable navigation, well-chosen web-safe colors, and a complete lack of table borders and other annoying, unattractive HTML elements. Someday they will all be part of a big, random web site of rejected mockups, complete with links to the final sites themselves, so everyone can see what they forced me to do.

Of course, if I want to keep my job, I’ll have to hold off on the links.

She’s having problems at home. She asked me, “When are you going to move out?”

“As soon as I’m ready to.”

“When will you be ready to?”

“When I’m financially able to.”

“Why aren’t you financially able to now?”

She knows how little I make, and that I couldn’t possibly afford an apartment on my own. I was sitting at work, though, so I couldn’t say that. I’ve said it many times before anyhow. “Because I don’t need to, and I want to invest my money right now,” I said.

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

I was truly confused. “What is?”

“That you don’t need to.”

I couldn’t believe she said that. I mean, obviously everything could be taken as a matter of opinion, but frankly, whether or not I need to move out is pretty much fact. If she had said that she needed me to, that would be a different story. But she didn’t say it like that. She never says it like that. It’s always my problem, not hers. “I don’t need to. I have my home. You have yours. I don’t need to move out,” I said matter-of-factly.

Hastily she replied, “Well, goodbye,” in a tone that told me I was being an asshole.

“Goodbye,” I said confidently, knowing that if she wanted me to be an asshole, I should just accept it, because neither hell nor high water could convince her to change her mind.

I keep hearing news stories about the future of the internet, and how someday we’ll all have lightning fast access. We’ll be able to download Internet Explorer at home in three seconds instead of three hours, and the endless time we web developers spend compressing graphics will be available for more important tasks.

I don’t believe a word of it.

People seem to think that a worldwide fiber optic network connecting every single house with a computer will somehow pop up out of nowhere within the next few years. Frankly, the manpower needed to accomplish that would solve unemployment accross the planet and require more money than America’s national deficit.

Of course, I’m making up these figures, but they sound accurate enough to me.

Many designers are making "high-bandwidth" sites – ones that only download in a reasonable amount of time if you are on a direct connection. We who use modems (the majority of internet users) are forced to wait more than our short attention spans can tolerate just to see web pages.

We’re stuck between two philosophies, though. As a designer, I want to express my creativity. I want to create interesting visual experiences and not be oppressed by "bandwidth constraints". At the same time, though, I want to offer fast downloads so my audience won’t be put off.

The idea of a high-speed internet is wonderful. Unfortunately, it’s currently nothing more than an idealistic dream.

I make about ten bucks an hour, full time, to build web sites for this company.

If I were doing freelance work, I could possibly be getting more than I make in a year just for building one site.

This sucks.

So why not quit my job and go freelance? Freelancing is great if you can get the work, but unfortunately, I can’t be sure that I’ll get the work.

I’m just not good enough yet. I’ve never even gotten a Cool Site award (except for The New Venue, but that’s really Jason’s baby, not mine). I want to tell people my URL and hear them say, “Oh yeah! I’ve been there. You designed that?”

So far that just hasn’t happened.

So I’m browsing the web, minding my own business, and I think…

“Hey, just for kicks, I wonder what the Cool Site of the Day is?”

I don’t check very often. But today, feeling particularly bored, and having no intriguing hyperlinks to follow, I decided to find out what site had been awarded that oh-so-coveted award.

I clicked on the button to see today’s site, and then went back to my lunch while I waited for it to load. When I looked up at the screen, I saw The New Venue.

Thinking I must have accidentally clicked my own bookmark for The New Venue, I went back to the Cool Site of the Day page and clicked the button again. The New Venue appeared again.

The New Venue is the Cool Site of the Day for June 19, 1998.

Jason, Bart, and I have been working on the New Venue for months. It’s Jason’s baby. He’s the man behind it. He’s been working on it for at least a year now. Bart, the producer of the D.Film Digital Film Festival, came in to produce it, and I came in to provide all the JavaScript and CGI programming. The three of us are the ones who make it work. We’re the ones who care for it. We’re the ones who download dozens of multi-megabyte QuickTime movies and decide which one will be featured next.

As I’m writing this, Jason still doesn’t know that we got the award. He’s at work, prob’ly thinking that he’ll come home and see the typical eighty or so hits to The New Venue home page. Surprise, Jason. We’ve gotten close to three thousand in the past twelve hours. Time for champagne, my friend.

We’re officially cool.

So I’m sitting here at work. I’m supposed to be making a web site for this company. They make valves. I don’t know what kind of valves. I just know they make valves. Of course, they want to include pictures of all their valves, even though most of their customers already know exactly what they need.

They give us these image files, and they’re all in AutoCAD format. AutoCAD is an extremely proprietary 3-D drawing program. Basically no computer program on Earth can read AutoCAD files except–you guessed it–AutoCAD. It’s like a four thousand dollar program, and we do not have it.

The sales department calls the customer and asks them to save it in another format. They do not know how.

Now, if I bought a four thousand dollar program, I’d prob’ly learn how to use it. Heck, I would consider it an honor to read the manual, which must be worth at least three hundred dollars. Of course, I wouldn’t want to get any fingerprints or scratches on it.

The customer asks our sales department to call this other company, who works with them on AutoCAD stuff, to ask about converting the files. I personally call this company. It turns out they are AutoCAD distributors, and they provide free technical support to the valve company. They’ll be happy to show the valve people how to convert their files.

So my boss calls up the customer and asks him to call his own damn technical support and find out how to convert his own damn files. (She didn’t phrase it quite like that, but if I had made the call, I would have.) She tells them to save them as TIFF files, because TIFF is a pretty standard file format, so it should be easy for them.

A couple days later, my boss hands me the new Zip disk from the valve company. I stick it in the network Zip drive, which is located on the other side of the office, because our company is too cheap to spring for more than one Zip drive per department.

The files are there. They’re all in TIFF format. And they’re the crappiest images I’ve ever seen. I don’t know what kind of options were given to these people when they saved the files, but they chose all the wrong ones. The images are schematics for valves. None of the text there is readable (because it’s about four points and not anti-aliased, for those of you who work with graphics), the images are way too small to see clearly, and on top of that, the files contain an incredible amount of white space, and they take up far more disk space than I can account for.

I know these people have no clue what they’re doing, so I can’t really blame them for giving us such bad images to work with. However, I have two complaints…

First, I know that when we get these images up on their web site, they are going to be very unhappy with the image quality and actually blame us for it, when we’re just using exactly what they provided. True that we didn’t have AutoCAD, which made an inconvenient situation, but we’re a web development company, not a 3-D graphics company.

Second, why did they spend four thousand dollars on a computer program and then never learn how to use it? For that kind of an investment, I would at least read the manual, and I’d prob’ly spend another fifty bucks and take a workshop or hire someone to teach me how to use it. Even if I didn’t do that, I would certainly take advantage of the fact that I have free technical support from my AutoCAD provider, instead of trying to get my web development company to call them for me.

Maybe I’m just upset because for the money they spent on a program they don’t understand, I could have bought myself that previously owned Volkswagon Jetta I’ve been coveting.

I have entered an elite group on the web…

I have my own domain name.

God it feels good. No longer will I struggle with long or cryptic URLs. No longer am I just a user on another man’s site. I am the webmaster now. I make the rules. I make the error documents. I make it all.

Why did I do it? Two reasons. First, I’ve known for a long time that I had to do it. Everyone who’s anyone on the web has his own domain name. Second, the price just went down. Thirty percent of the cost used to go to some sort of special Internet fund, but that arrangement expired on March 31.

So now I am officially “randomness.com,” and man, I feel cool. Of course, I also had to move all my web pages, but hey, that’s life.

I finally got a job, and now I understand Dilbert cartoons.

I have a job at a web development company that’s about an hour away in rush hour traffic (or fifteen minutes at non-peak times). Their big thing is not designing pretty sites, but rather creating useful, business-oriented, database-driven applications, such as catalogs. They mostly concentrate on the information, and not so much on the appearance.

Hell, they concentrate not at all on appearance.

Their motto should be “We build boring web sites.” Maybe I’ll suggest that sometime. Maybe not.

They hired me because they are “expanding rapidly.” I originally assumed that this meant they had many orders coming in and a great deal of work to be done, but I have learned that neither of these is true.

Basically I have less than an hour of work to do each day.

The rest of the time, though, I have to “look busy.” The purpose of this is not so that I can steer clear of real work. There really is very little real work, and when it comes, they give it to me whether I look busy or not.

So why do I have to look busy? I have no idea. They didn’t tell me why I should look busy, but they told me I should look busy. I’m assuming it has to do with company morale or something.

I don’t really mind having to look busy without having anything to accomplish, though. After all, here at work I have a T-1 connection to the internet.

For those of you who are not familiar with T-1, let me explain it briefly: Your modem at home is a paraplegic turtle. My T-1 is light. In other words, it’s really fast.

So I can now spend my days doing basically the same thing I did before I got a job, but with better equipment, and I’m getting paid for it.

I like my job.

I cleaned my desk on Monday. Highlight of my week. It was piled a good 6″ with papers and boxes and books and other random junk, and my mom has been telling me to clean it for weeks, so finally, in a fit of boredom, I actually went through every single thing on my desk.

It’s amazing: Whenever I do that, I find out that there are only about five or six items (of the hundred or so that were there) that actually NEED to be on my desk. The rest of it mostly went in the trash, though a good amount also went into file folders in (of all places) my file cabinet.

It’s nice to be organized. It really is. I like the way my room looks when it’s all clean and orderly. And then there’s less chance of having really big bugs too.

Next I have to tackle my shelves. I’m going to give away all my legos. It’s a sad job, but I have to do it. They’re taking up space, and I’m just not that interested in them anymore.

I’ve realized that an important part of decluttering my room is taking my mind of the incredible amount of money that was spent on all the crap I’m giving/throwing away.

SEX! SEX! SEX!

That was just to make sure you’re still paying attention.

A couple weeks ago I cleaned out my closet. I gave away literally hundreds of dollars worth of clothing and costumes. The only way I can accomplish this without having a heart attack is to get it out of my site really quickly. I leave myself very little time to actually realize the expense of all the crap I’m disposing of.

I’m totally rambling. Allow me to put it all in a more philosophical perspective, so maybe we’ll feel like we’ve gained something from this…

Why do I desire an organized room? I want an organized life. I have no idea where I’ll be in a year, five years, ten years… I don’t want to end up a mess. So in order to prove to myself that my life doesn’t have to be a mess, I feel it necessary to prove that my room needn’t be a mess. And on top of that, with the stress of not knowing what the future holds, who wants to add the stress of not knowing where a good ruler is? I don’t.

So I’m looking at all the other sites on the web where people post rants all the time…

www.suck.com
www.eod.com
www.endquote.com
www.fray.com
www.cacophony.com
www.soundbitten.com
www.theobvious.com
www.prehensile.com
www.kia.net/colors
www.afterdinner.com

…and they’re all really good and well designed and most of them update their pages really often, so I’m feeling quite a bit of penis envy toward them right now.

I haven’t posted a rant in over a month, and I haven’t written one in even longer than that. I’m very depressed about my lack of creativity. You know, I’ve always said that the one thing I miss about being in school is that my unhappiness there forced me to write. Writing was my escape, and it was beautiful. Now life is too easy, I’ve been out of school over two years now, and I don’t have that spark in me anymore. I don’t need to write to relieve myself of stress because frankly I live a stress-free life.

Meanwhile, I still haven’t gotten a job, and it’s bothering me. I want to be a web designer. But my sites just aren’t good enough yet. I need to find my niche on the web. I need to figure out what I can do better than anyone else.

You know what my most popular web page is? Quote of the Moment. It’s one page. It has a random quote on it. That’s it. The page averages just under a thousand hits a day. Meanwhile, Clip Art is lucky to get above fifty hits a day, and most of my other pages average out to about one hit per day. How lame is that? The one thing I ever did right was something for which I did very little. Simplicity triumphed. But web designers don’t get hired for their simple sites. They get hired for their sophisticated sites–sites that are full of vibrant images and lengthy content.

Actually, while writing this, I received a letter from a delighted fan of Clip Art. Of course, she found it through the link on Quote of the Moment. Maybe there’s a market in that.

I’m prob’ly going to overhaul Igno-Rant and Clip Art. I’m tired of the lack of interest. The public has spoken. They’ve told me I’m not giving them what they want, so I’m going to turn around and give them what they want. I just need a little time to work on it. I need to know what I’m doing before I start. I need to build the site that people want to see.

Right now I’m going to sleep. Hopefully I’ll dream of the perfect web site. Even so, it might always be a dream.