mrpatto

They are just hotted-up tigers. 

Patrick Stewart, owner of the world's most awesome voice was on The Nerdist Podcast recently. Apparently he had "no sense of humour" when he first started on Star Trek. It's a great listen, but really just an excuse to post this clip of Sir Patrick as "himself" on Extras.

Just hearing him say "nude" with that voice is hilarious.

It was probably the 90s, though perhaps the late 80s, when Stacks Warehouse commercials ran pretty much continuously. Stacks Warehouse was some kind of discount store, I can't even remember what they sold.

What I do remember is that for the entirety of their televised existence they were perpetually closing down. Every sale was a closing down sale, it was always the last days. Like one of those "end of the world" sign carriers, but with a bigger media budget.

Eventually they actually did close down, only to be reborn during a commerical break months later as "Stacks 2". (Unpromoted subtitle: "The Revenge"). This website has been "pulling a Stacks" for years, constantly being redesigned, undesigned, half designed and pulled down, then being reborn.

This is just the latest version, a phoenix which is starting to consider the whole fiery birth thing as a tiresome interruption to a really good sleep. This newest generation of the phoenix is hosted on Virb, the slick new entrant in the "who needs a designer?" website creation market.

Who does need a designer? Anyone who wants to do serious customisation, or integration with other tools. Anyone who probably already has access to people with the time, and access to money to pay them with. For many small businesses and individuals a Virb site will be completely fine, and probably a lot nicer than what they would get from the low bidder on an Elance project.

Many years ago I thought that the great masses of web designers who were only providing HTML and CSS skills were in a dying business. It is inevitable that bandwidth and tools will advance to the point where automated markup will be good enough for most people.

There will always be space for the craftsmen, the expert coder who gets right into the details and custom codes for the specifics of your business and your customers. Those people aren't doing the $599 web designs you see advertised on telegraph poles next to "work from home, free your soul" posters.

Personally I made the move to join Campaign Monitor almost 5 years ago to get out of the straight coding role. My pure design skills we fine for that era, where coding was a highly valued skill. In 2011 the best web design (vs front end coding) is beyond my capbilities. I am not a graphic designer by training or by talent.

So I need to let go of that, and stop worrying about getting the design just right. I can't design to meet my own standards,  at least not without spending a lot of time I don't have. What I can do is improve the skill I use every day in my current job, writing.

That is the reason for the resurrection of mrpatto.com. Regular writing to improve my  ability to communicate clearly and quickly. I see the irony of the long, rambling blog post to announce this goal, and I choose to ignore it.