Return To Raphael Webscapes: Lessons in Minimalism, Multi-tasking, and Smiling Babies.
“The server’s down! The server’s down! The-server-is-down!”
These three words (or four depending on how you parse them) can mean death for a web design office as sure as a ruined batch of chocolate will make the Keebler elves cry. It wasn’t even an hour into my first day back when the announcement came from the front room. Sharon couldn’t turn on the server without it beeping at us apologetically and letting a sigh from its fan as if to say: “Poke me all you want, humans, I ain’t getting up!”
Images of similar technological catastrophe sprang to mind: The New York City black out, Chernobyl, Ashlee Simpson’s performance on SNL, these perhaps a bit more dire than the situation we found ourselves in. Either way, we were at an impasse: without the server we had no files, and without our files we couldn’t build websites.
Not to worry! In the background as I had been pacing around in circles mumbling “Server down…server down…server down,” Barbara and Sharon were busy hooking up the backup server. Fifteen minutes from the time our sleepy server pooped out to my final unnecessary outburst of “Oh why? Why do we suffer so?!” Barbara had us up and running again. Relieved and slightly embarrassed, I sat down and began working quietly. It was good to be back.
In the three years since I last worked here, Raphael Webscapes (RW) has fluctuated in size and furniture positioning, but it’s still the same place I remember before leaving (in my case, to pursue the time honored tradition of breaking my parents’ economic spirit through expensive education). We have a few more Mac’s and less PC’s, our programs are newer and more sophisticated, our sites are still clean and darn good looking – up to 125 sites from the sixty I knew of when I left, I was surprised to find out. And of course, Barbara still seems to wear the office’s telephone as a stylish addition to her daily ensemble.
Where before we were split between two of the three rooms in the office (the furthest third room being for lunch and other mealtime enjoyment) we now work in one. Behind me, Barbara fields the steady stream of customer calls and solicitations for time-shares in Morocco as she sifts through mountains of e-mail. To my right beyond a potted house plant Sharon designs a page for a designer dress outlet, and next to her Bob is prepping our new corporate site for its final launch. Elena, Sharon’s baby girl and the newest and cutest addition to the RW team, burbles and laughs from her Kick-n-Play mat. XPN plays nonstop from our spunky GE radio.
My time at RW has been short, as I’m between having returned from a 6-month stint in South East Asia and going back to school, but I’m happy to say it didn’t lack action. If anything the dynamic created here can aptly be compared to a controlled experiment in painting a room by exploding paint cans. Somehow, much of the time through dedicated trial and error, things work out. But that’s the soul of design isn’t it? Creativity forged through hitting a wall and then trying something else (large corporations call it R&D).
In my case I experimented in using common sense simplicity when creating the structure of a site. Like so many other technology dorks, when I see a new way of using a technology I want to go out and use it! So, while doing an update for Haddonfield’s First Night website I saw how Bob had used PHP to shrink a large site like First Night into intuitive and easy to navigate sections (which saved me much appreciated time during updates). Predictably, I chomped at the bit to try out the new technique on a project I was working on for Barbara. The only difference between the two was that First Night uses dozens of pages of code and hundreds of words worth of copy. Comparatively my project may have required about seven pages of code and 300 words of copy.
What resulted was nice, clean looking site, where the plumbing behind it was a tangle of unnecessary includes and dangling string queries. To continue my paint can metaphor, the walls looked fine, but I used C4 explosive where a simple paint brush would have sufficed. In the end, Barbara pointed out my mistake, being careful not to insult my delicate sense artistic and engineering brilliance, and we were able to put together an elegant and simple product that I’m proud to have designed.
Seven years in the design biz had taught the company one essential nugget of operational truth, as Barbara puts it: “Minimalism doesn’t mean less work, it just means doing it the right way.”
With the new year upon us and people scrambling to revamp their company identities and marketability the phones are still ringing healthily, so I’m not afraid of leaving Barbara with nothing to do. The Scottish psychiatrist, RD. Laing wrote that we “live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.” In my case, winter brought the holidays, the new year, and it renewed my connection to Raphael Webscapes after a three year hiatus. Moreover it does seem as if my time here appeared and then disappeared quickly as a snowflake on a car window. But I’ll be back, Barbara said she might let me paint the office.
These three words (or four depending on how you parse them) can mean death for a web design office as sure as a ruined batch of chocolate will make the Keebler elves cry. It wasn’t even an hour into my first day back when the announcement came from the front room. Sharon couldn’t turn on the server without it beeping at us apologetically and letting a sigh from its fan as if to say: “Poke me all you want, humans, I ain’t getting up!”
Images of similar technological catastrophe sprang to mind: The New York City black out, Chernobyl, Ashlee Simpson’s performance on SNL, these perhaps a bit more dire than the situation we found ourselves in. Either way, we were at an impasse: without the server we had no files, and without our files we couldn’t build websites.
Not to worry! In the background as I had been pacing around in circles mumbling “Server down…server down…server down,” Barbara and Sharon were busy hooking up the backup server. Fifteen minutes from the time our sleepy server pooped out to my final unnecessary outburst of “Oh why? Why do we suffer so?!” Barbara had us up and running again. Relieved and slightly embarrassed, I sat down and began working quietly. It was good to be back.
In the three years since I last worked here, Raphael Webscapes (RW) has fluctuated in size and furniture positioning, but it’s still the same place I remember before leaving (in my case, to pursue the time honored tradition of breaking my parents’ economic spirit through expensive education). We have a few more Mac’s and less PC’s, our programs are newer and more sophisticated, our sites are still clean and darn good looking – up to 125 sites from the sixty I knew of when I left, I was surprised to find out. And of course, Barbara still seems to wear the office’s telephone as a stylish addition to her daily ensemble.
Where before we were split between two of the three rooms in the office (the furthest third room being for lunch and other mealtime enjoyment) we now work in one. Behind me, Barbara fields the steady stream of customer calls and solicitations for time-shares in Morocco as she sifts through mountains of e-mail. To my right beyond a potted house plant Sharon designs a page for a designer dress outlet, and next to her Bob is prepping our new corporate site for its final launch. Elena, Sharon’s baby girl and the newest and cutest addition to the RW team, burbles and laughs from her Kick-n-Play mat. XPN plays nonstop from our spunky GE radio.
My time at RW has been short, as I’m between having returned from a 6-month stint in South East Asia and going back to school, but I’m happy to say it didn’t lack action. If anything the dynamic created here can aptly be compared to a controlled experiment in painting a room by exploding paint cans. Somehow, much of the time through dedicated trial and error, things work out. But that’s the soul of design isn’t it? Creativity forged through hitting a wall and then trying something else (large corporations call it R&D).
In my case I experimented in using common sense simplicity when creating the structure of a site. Like so many other technology dorks, when I see a new way of using a technology I want to go out and use it! So, while doing an update for Haddonfield’s First Night website I saw how Bob had used PHP to shrink a large site like First Night into intuitive and easy to navigate sections (which saved me much appreciated time during updates). Predictably, I chomped at the bit to try out the new technique on a project I was working on for Barbara. The only difference between the two was that First Night uses dozens of pages of code and hundreds of words worth of copy. Comparatively my project may have required about seven pages of code and 300 words of copy.
What resulted was nice, clean looking site, where the plumbing behind it was a tangle of unnecessary includes and dangling string queries. To continue my paint can metaphor, the walls looked fine, but I used C4 explosive where a simple paint brush would have sufficed. In the end, Barbara pointed out my mistake, being careful not to insult my delicate sense artistic and engineering brilliance, and we were able to put together an elegant and simple product that I’m proud to have designed.
Seven years in the design biz had taught the company one essential nugget of operational truth, as Barbara puts it: “Minimalism doesn’t mean less work, it just means doing it the right way.”
With the new year upon us and people scrambling to revamp their company identities and marketability the phones are still ringing healthily, so I’m not afraid of leaving Barbara with nothing to do. The Scottish psychiatrist, RD. Laing wrote that we “live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.” In my case, winter brought the holidays, the new year, and it renewed my connection to Raphael Webscapes after a three year hiatus. Moreover it does seem as if my time here appeared and then disappeared quickly as a snowflake on a car window. But I’ll be back, Barbara said she might let me paint the office.
posted by Matt Lindeboom at 12:22 PM
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