The Rise of the Clay Wrestler

When I started out creating websites I was kind of amazed to find the ‘lingua franca’ of website design to be Adobe Photoshop (PSD). Getting the graphics you need for the website from a PSD is still quite a clunky manual operation and of course the functional parts like menus, buttons are just ‘representations’ of what the designer is looking for. There’s no guarantee that in fact the designer has thought those functional things through anyway, let alone documented them. The process of getting the actual site functioning often comes from a dialogue between the graphic designer and the web dev/skinner/coder. It seemed to be an unnecessary and lengthy step, putting all those hours of work into something that’s just visual (the PSD), compared to say, designing with a WYSIWIG-ish editor such as Dreamweaver.

My initial doubts about PSD’s were dispelled during my first jobs as a CMS/blog skinner – initially with DotNetNuke and then with WordPress. Nope, there’s no way an ‘artistically gifted’ designer could work directly with either beast I thought. Better to just leave them to their right-hemispheres to come up with visuals that look balanced and beautiful, rather than visual afterthoughts when the left brain has flaked out with the complexity of it all. I have a niche here, I thought, between the designer and platform, a ‘skinner’ if you will (maybe the shortest-lived job title in history).

But skinning is quite laborious, and it would be expensive if the skinner got paid much ;o) The sheer slog of manually producing design requirements in a site – all the little trims and functional things that make a site seem modern, slick, maybe ‘cool’. Obviously the expense of all this isn’t a much of a problem for larger businesses and corps but for smaller businesses, paying many thousands for an original design for a modern, functional website platform was starting to look like it could be better spent. And that’s when it started looking like a better bet to start adapting ready built themes – themes that have a lot of the time consuming bells and whistles already built in.

Then I began working with ‘frameworks’ on top of the CMS and the ground shifted. I was now working with an amorphous machine, a web based Transformer ™ The design process becomes something of a wrestling match with a functioning machine, creating new arms and legs with new appearances and abilities. Sites to nearly match major corporate sites could be ‘rustled up’ in a couple of weeks. I’m struggling to come up with an analogy here, it’s not like car design with all that metal to shape. It’s a bit like designing a car in clay, beginning with pre-formed shapes, but different in that the clay model doesn’t actually work whereas the website does. This clay takes on forms and functions as you mold it. This clay kicks ass!