Lately, if you've inhaled the composition of one lonely carbon and a pair of oxygens in the web design field of dreams, you've probably noticed the putrid stench of "suck" in the air. It's easily missed unless you're paying attention to the signs, some which are obvious and some that are quite obviously, not.

One simple thing that might tip you off is that the majority of web sites littering the web are not architecturally or visually "foxy." Thanks to this growing junk heap of lousy HTML code clogging the pipes, we've careened full-throttle into the midst of something called the Web 2.0 Revolution. Designers are going old school with a little modern javascript and beveled graphics thrown in, utilizing the original rules of html construction from the inventors of the web and turning tail on a generation of bad coding practice. This approach is brilliant, but thanks in part to the open source mentality of the Web 2.0 innovators, slowly but surely, web sites are all starting to look the same -- A world wide web of sexy, easily updated and navigated fembots, all wearing the same lingerie and lipstick -- how, *cough*... neat. A little further down the road to suck, lies the majority of the Creative Departments in our fine colleges. As far as the "I" can see, many still split up print designers and web designers quicker than they can suckle a funnel of warm hops. The rationale of separating creative people into the sketch artists vs. the code jockeys boggles even my miniature, ape-like mind, considering the increasingly diversifying tapestry of the employed creative world, unravelling in the past 10 years.

Some things are not so obvious to the untrained sniffer, like the fact that the Anti-Christ of the web, Jacob Nielsen has gradually cultivated a really smart congregation in the Creative World -- a planet where it seems most designers have been beaten so hard with a fear stick that they've started thinking that the rantings of a madman could really be the gospel truth from the savior of your choice. Now before you take me out to the wood shed to beat some sense into me faster than you can say "useit.com", keep in mind that Mr. Nielsen was the guy that said Flash is a waste of time in 2000. He changed his tune a few years ago when he formed an alliance with Macromedia, but I'll still hold it against him to show my grandfatherly "web age." While there are times when I do agree with the old fella, blackballing software without an intimate understanding of the full capabilities of the application, is a bit like blaming computers for the fact that the design profession is going to the dogs...

...Wait a sec. Did I hear a woof in the distance?

In the Beginning, there was The Brain. The Brain came up with all kinds of neat stuff to ensure that we didn't need to use it as much -- Putting fire into a convenient lighter so we didn't have to look for sticks to rub together; Guiding us to make weapons so we didn't need to come up with clever arguments to get away from confrontation; Creating GPS systems so we never really have to remember how to get anywhere. In fact, when The Brain rolled out It's shining achievement, designed in It's own graven image -- the personal computer -- The Brain basically let us monkeys know It was heading to the retirement home. The Brain was tired, and this number-crunching doohickey sure could do a lot of the legwork that It always did in the past.

So, it's with this chicklet-covered computer keyboard that my Neanderthal knuckles are tippity tapping, fighting tooth-and-nail the evolutionary pattern of our skull-nugget taking a back seat to the revolution it designed -- all in the interest of entertaining your trusting skull-googlers (or eyes just in case your brain has already shut down it's power to grasp dreadful metaphors).

Thanks to our sometimes trustworthy friend, the computer, work gets done faster. When work gets done faster, money can be made quicker. And if a designer can use a computer, they must be able to do that "design thing" really fast, right? Well, sort of.

If you can type, you can code fast, but it doesn't help to generate the "bravo!-inducing" idea for a client. That's what the brain is for. Sadly, as I mentioned above, our brains are getting all mushy on us. And after that primordial ooze clears out from between our ears, what are we left with?

We are left with...

...mySpace is a naughty little scamp in the war of standards-based html, *poofing* an instant website for bands, Stans and Pams alike with underlying code so fantastically awful, that it should be covered in molasses, dipped gently in wet husky fur and dragged through a slip n' slide of harvester ants at war with poisonous beetles. What makes the code so mind-numbingly bad is the fact that there's enough of it stuffed behind the scenes on a single page to code an entire web site. This is because the "Dumbing of Design Bible" says that as long as you can make it look good on the front, it doesn't matter what the code looks like. This Holy Writ also says if the user can create something quickly and without any knowledge of how things work behind the scenes, it leaves them plenty of time to do things like watch advertisements, eat chips, and watch their friend list grow.

Even bothering to make your own web site is becoming something that old folks did back before all that "dot com" stuff went belly-up in an innocuous cloud of Cheech and Chong smoke. With mySpace, both individuality and design prowess are becoming less important than how many knuckleheads you have in your fictitious network of "pals." I noticed that some of my mySpace friends have thousands of friends... so, obviously that's why they haven't returned my calls.

If mySpace is the hobgoblin, then the recent scourge of overseas "designers" is the bugbear. A recent visit to the website "guru.com" has revealed that the majority of web designers and programmers available for contract work are located in Pakistan and India. Not to say that they aren't consummate professionals, but with rates ranging from $10-$50 hour for everything from coding, to branding, to web design, you ain't getting the most bang for your buck. My pal told me that "when you pay peanuts you get monkeys," and being a part-time monkey myself, I think he's referring to the lowest tools on the "eep ladder." With $10-$50 an hour design rates, if you don't have a client that needs to put together a web budget to hide from the tax man, or you can't prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the creative poop you're hurling through the creative cage doesn't stink, there's going to be trouble in the zoo.

A while back, a bunch of geezerly designers that couldn't figure out how to use a computer any quicker than program a VCR, decided that the world would be better served and squeezed of creative budgets if graphic designers were "certified" like lawyers and doctors. All this chippity-chap about designers being validated by an exam and a piece of paper will become the incoherent blubbering of the lunatic fringe if the combination of low design expectations (mySpace) mixed with equally low rates for designing and programming, places the above average designer on the streets.

Mom and Pop, get ready, because if we designers don't get our act together soon, your little college graduates are going to be taking back their old bedroom soon -- and they're gonna want the top shelf liquor they became accustomed to in the glory days of higher budgets and usable web sites.

Maybe, just maybe, dear old Jacob is on to something after all...

It became painfully obvious to me on Saturday night that regardless of how "foolproof and airtight" the internet might be, it still requires one important thing to produce the flowing sewage pipe (that can be maintained easily by the H&A Brooklyn Plumbing | Plumbing Experts, Plumbing Installation Service) of increasingly useless information we gleefully slurp upon on a daily basis: Electric charge. You can check this guide about water pipe leaks to know about pipe repairs and get expert plumbing services.

According to electrician winchester va, this mighty electrical current is a necessity, empowering the servers which house this information. Without it, they are rendered as impotent as a champion stud mule two minutes past his prime. I learned this lesson first hand on Saturday night by following the weather trends in the Other Coast; the place known as "Not New York City" -- Los Angles, Californication... The Land of Buttermilk and Funny.

It would seem that the folkies on the West Coast have been suffering at the hands of "Old Man Winters'" sour, inbred half-cousin, "Ol' Ghoul Summer." His hand-delivered nasty summer brush fires will likely be followed by killer bees, a rainstorm of frogs and possibly living, hissing snakes running amok on planes, attacking and cooking everything that's not nailed down to the bottom of a fancy, petrol-chilled pool in the West Hollywood Hills.

Zuleyka Rivera from Puerto Rico collapsed in a pool of sweetly scented sweat in "Los Hades" after winning the crown of Miss Universe on Sunday night. Being a thinking primate for at least 1.2 hours of my 27 hour work day, I realized that much like human beings, without air conditioning (contact #1 HVAC of San Diego, CA! Air Conditioning Heating Repair Contractor for any services), servers overheat and shut down -- just without all that "complaining and dramatic passing out" nonsense. omeowners rushed to contact hvac services to check on their units. So horrific was this meltdown of servers in the cooled server hives in LA, LA Land, that the 2nd most frequented web site in all of cyberland, "mySpace," suffered a shutdown on Saturday and finally came back up to full strength on Monday along with a million or so other sites. H

So, we'll have to be patient, strip down to our skivvies and wait to see how this heat wave ends. Usually, we can count on Fall and Winter in the Northeast, but with the certainty of Global Warming stinkin' up the planet, we can probably count on an early ski season in Los Angeles as well. Until that happens, there's one request from us New Yorkers for all you folks in the Los Angeles area: Turn off those air conditioning units (that can be maintained beautifully by scheduling the maintenance with the Top HVAC Long Island | tophvaclongisland.com experts) that are cooling your pools, fancy pets, and Jetson-inspired drinking containers, and we'll keep designing web standards compliant web sites to make your browsers happy and your designers filled with awe, then fear, and finally, rays of happy mayhem-inducing sunshine.

When I was playing the part of a student at Buffalo State College, I coasted through most of my classes by using an essay writing service reddit. Now that's not to say that I was some hot-shot designer (or maybe I was, I'll never tell). It just means that during my tenure in the graphic design department at Buffalo State College, computer-aided graphic design was in it's infancy. In other words, you either got it, or you didn't. Software applications like Adobe Illustrator (88), and Photoshop were mere shells of what they've become today, and most beginner design classes involved rapturous lessons like "how to use a mouse" and "how to find the print button on a GUI." (Yea, I've used GUI to speak to the designers out there -- they never used the word GUI in school in 1989. Nerds used that word, and weird little nerds weren't invited outside of their dorms. Ever.)

Out of this apocalyptic landscape of computer-less design (yea, I know I'm waxing a bit dramatic here, but who cares - it makes for better reading), came a man with a beard and a familiar name...

Rand Schuster was a burly hippie, covered in long, stringy black hair peppered with several strands of gray (stress), and a beard that made you shout "Boo-Ya!" (in a horrified way) every time he passed by. He was definitely from the age of Aquarius, yet taught me (and maybe a couple others in the class who weren't sleeping off last nights hangovers or taking a class in design to coast through college to a glorious life of husbandry, accounting, waiting tables or giving lap-dances at local Buffalo strip club) quite a bit about design and value of deadlines. His temper was legendary, and he would be the first to tell you "Get the hell out of this business!" at the drop of a client.

I managed to take a couple semesters with the guy and beneath the beard and his weird, yet oddly approachable demeanor, stood a designer at the crossroads of his career. He loved the industry one day and despised everything about it the next. He kept his classes on the edge, wondering day by day if they should just head over to the local junkyard and apply for any job that would take them far, far away from an industry that would make you into this much of a paranoid maniac. Keep in mind this was a man with the almost Royal name of "Rand" -- duh. Paul Rand; Rand Schuster, I mean it was as powerful a "designer name" as Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt in the acting profession. He wore the "suit of odd," which meant students could look forward to a joyous career of sandals and over-washed rock shirts as work attire with daily bathing as an option. Yee ha! A future life as an eternal college student!

What I'm saying is that the guy kind of looked like a bear. Not a cuddly one, mind you. More like a terrifying, Steven Colbert-nightmare inducing grizzly bear of design. A benevolent monster that would eat your work and leave it smoking in the woods once it passed through his digestive track. The truth is, once you got to know the guy, you realized that what he wanted you to do was to become a designer almost by yourself.

An interesting approach when you think about it.

He wasn't the best critiquer in the world, but I noticed how he silently reveled during a class where we all slammed each others work like a proud papa bear, grinning a toothy, albeit sinister grin. It seemed like he wasn't trying to save the world, or even ensure that everyone in the class was accounted for. He appeared to try to develop just a few designers in each class that would go out into the world and hopefully do something with their miserable lives. He did this by remaining quiet until someone asked him his opinion. The kids who really wanted to have a career in the design world would speak up and ask him a question. It's a wild approach that I've tried to apply in my own career when I've had the pleasure of managing great creatives. Give them space, give them direction and let them know that you're looking out for them -- all from a distance.

Or maybe Rand just didn't give a shit and hated teaching and designing. I prefer the other explanation myself.