Earlier today I found an ancient 16 MB USB thumb drive (yes, they made them that small) in a little tin I've had since the 1990s. Within a folder on the drive, I found an old portfolio of mine with the associated image files. Looking through I found an image I had used successfully in my portfolio for a few years even though it had a glaring error on it. The error was pre-acknowledged in the presentation and highlighted in the portfolio to show that even with the best efforts, Murphy and his law will pay a visit at some point.
The image below is a screenshot of a website I built overnight for a client back in the early 2000s. Back then people thought web developers and graphic designers were technological witch doctors that magically made websites and artwork appear on computers. Visual-based web-builders of the era were clunky and produced horrible code, it was a talent to code visually and understand early versions of HTML & CSS. With such reverence, it wasn't long before a prima donna personality set in thanks to the constant ego feed via adulation from satisfied clients.
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| A website screenshot from the early 2000s used successfully in a portfolio despite containing an error, |
Designers need to have an ego in order to be assertive and courageous enough to think outside the box to provide the "in-the-box" solutions clients expect. For talented designers, it was often an accepted behavior. Like Patton and Montgomery, two World War Two generals who were known as prima donnas, the ego allowed them to push the limits and think outside the box to defeat their nemesis Rommel in combat. The success of these generals in combat depended greatly upon their ego and allowed them to surmount the challenges they faced.
Designers pushing the edges of the norm is what got us from that "video-game console-era web design like above to the amazingly interactive websites we have today. The ego provides a designer the necessary backbone to say "Hey, I need that content tomorrow or the deadline is toast." Like the Enterprize's "Scottie," the designer has padded the time estimate by a few hours for themselves to seemingly pull a miracle out of the hat.
So the client finally gets you the new content at 10:00 pm the night before the site is scheduled to launch. An all-nighter later and miracle made... However, as the image below clearly shows the blue box outline, an element of the button was incorrectly coded... Ooops!!! Miracle now imperfect...
Embarrassingly, typos are the gremlins of code and can slip into the code easily and at any time as shown in this "Turn of the Century" website build proof that was sent to the client after an all-nighter coding session.
There's no need to feel bad about such "human" errors though ... One missed " />" tag in your HTML code and a professional design (for the time) becomes a moment of humility with the client. The designer still is the hero of the day in the client's eyes as they recognize that the designer spent all night entering new changes to and performing last minute edits to content. A quick-fix and we're done...
A missing closing tag, after all, takes only a few minutes to fix, and he got it done overnight... Wow! I successfully used this image as part of my portfolio to show I am human too and won't cop an attitude as I know how easily such simple mistakes can be overlooked and fixed.
What has your experience been with regard to past mistakes? Respond below your comments and discussion.
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