The other day Barbara was kind enough to point me in the direction of this piece of writing titled “If Architects had to Work Like Web Designers”. Below is an extract.

“Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Please don’t bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet.

However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.” More.

It begins like this and continues on in much the same vein. What strikes me as odd about this is that the aim of the article appears to be to point out how tough the lot of the web designer is. Having to deal with clients that change their mind, have unreasonable demands etc. The thing is though, the imaginary client in this letter sounds like a typical architects client. Nothing really strikes me as being out of the ordinary.

Thus, in the spirit of taking the piss at most every opportunity, below is my cunningly titled rebuttal; “If Web Designers Had To Work Like Architects”.

If Web Designers Had To Work Like Architects

If Web Designers had to work like architects they would have to sell their snow boards.

The Web Designers clients would make unreasonable demands. The Web Designer would strive to juggle these demands with the big questions of web design. In the end however the Quantity Surveyor and the Project Manager play golf together and so what the Web Designer thinks don’t mean shit.

Having arrived at a design that all interested parties are happy with, the Web Designer would have to submit their files to a popularly elected ‘council’. This council would have no education in the graphic arts and their opinion of what constitutes good design would be influenced by two primary sources: the Channel Nine promo and their niece’s wedding invite. These people would have total control over what the web designer is permitted to draw and on many occasions will direct the design decisions of the web designer. Requests made by council will be frequently along the lines of, “I think it should look rusted, you know, to give it a sense of history”. Through protracted negotiations lasting roughly 18 months, the tenacious designer will be able to argue this back to more reasonable “The background will be textured and the general page layout will be based on medieval principles of proportion to give the page a sense of history”. If the Web Designer is unhappy with this outcome they may take the matter to court.

Once the project has been approved by client and the council if Web Designers had to work like architects they would upload their files to the server and three years later the web page would be available to view by the general public. Only it would look different. Because the guy at the web hosting company decided to ‘value manage’ the code without telling no one.

Oh, and if, like, seven years after you have finished the job, someone gets a papercut on a printout of the web page you designed advertising the local thai restaurant, then you will be liable for all damages. Granted, its not four square metres of glass spontaneously exploding, like, thirty-four stories in the air and showering down on an unsuspecting group of school children and their charity working teacher, but boy, them papercuts smart.

Sorry Barbara, I couldn’t resist…