3 April 2009

A while ago I overheard a fellow web developer say that Smashing Magazine should be required reading for any web professional. I adamantly oppose such advice. Inspirational and how-to publications certainly have their value — some of them are better than others — but as required reading they do nothing but keep us abreast on design trends, which frankly isn’t worth much in way of responding to design problems appropriately.

Web professionals who primarily feed on websites like Smashing Magazine or CSS Creme are doing a tremendous disservice to themselves, their clients, and their communities. Real innovation and clever solutions come more readily from contemplation and steady work, not constant inspiration.

To anyone who regularly reads such sites, I have this to say to you. Get curious! Do your own damn looking! And I mean in it the most encouraging way.

I appreciate what Chuck Close had to say about this:

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.