Summarizing Dutton’s faithfully imaginative examples of the evolutionary history of art, his point is quite agreeable that as far back as we can see human beings tend to admire skillfully crafted artifacts, and that this admiration, awe and wonder persist to the present. He seems to suggest that the more recent phenomenon of ‘conceptual art’ is considerably different from this more established sense of the artistic craft.

Writes Dutton:

What is important today is not technical skill, but skill in playing inventively with ideas.

‘Playing inventively with ideas’… I think that’s a brilliant phrase. Has the age of the image given way to the age of the idea? Can art become ideation? If so, what does that mean for art and artists? To be sure, there are those who take ideation to the level of art form, but don’t miss the point Dutton is raising. Ideation is typically viewed as a tool in the service of producing, yielding or creating something in physical space (whether visual, tactile, audible, etc.) Some ‘artists’ are essentially claiming that their idea (quite apart from its implementation, if any) is actually art.

Conceptual art refers not to an object or artifact crafted by an artist, but to an abstract idea of it, or to the purposeful arrangement of objects. ‘Found art’ could arguably be counted in this category. The conceptual artist provokes a thought or suggests an idea that is experienced as art. Imagine a painter of ideas, or a sculptor of the imagination. These are perhaps the ideal archetypes, but some contemporary conceptual artists elicit large sums of money by affixing their name to someone else’s artistic work and displaying it in a particular way (see Dutton’s article for some recent examples). The price awards the idea rather than the craftsmanship or manifestation of the arrangement of found objects themselves. Is this kind of mental transaction appropriately termed ‘art’ and is it actually worth funding?

Here we must visit the grey area between life lived and life portrayed. Some forms of art such as photography are admired because of the eye or the perspective of the artist more than the paper and ink or the pixels that display the piece (though artistic decisions are made in such details as well). Sometimes a poem’s only praiseworthy quality is that the poet has opened our eyes to see something old in a new way.

In essence, the artistic value is ultimately in the communicative action that reverberates between the artist and the one who encounters the artwork. The artwork itself is a vehicle for ideas. This is not the only viable philosophy of art, however.

Enter another observation by Dutton:

Even when we have lost contact with the social or religious ideas behind the arts of bygone civilizations, we are still able, as with the great bronzes or temples of Greece or ancient China, to respond directly to craftsmanship. The direct response to skill is what makes it possible to find beauty in many tribal arts even though we often know nothing about the beliefs of the people who created them. There is no place on earth where superlative technique in music and dance is not regarded as beautiful.

He is essentially observing the edge of a crisis of definition. What is art? But there is another more subtle question: who is the artist behind the art?

Yesterday, I heard a professor respond humorously to a list of key names that have contributed direction to a major building project. He pointed out that he should be listed among those names because, as a teacher, he had ’shaped and molded’ the man whose name the building bears. Although his comment was in jest, let’s imagine for a moment that it reflects a shift in our culture’s definition of art. At what point do we draw the line of ‘credit’ for the artistic achievement. I thought it was interesting that the architect and developer were not listed among those who have contributed significantly to the project. I’m quite sure, despite this oversight, that the men and women named are not the ones being paid to produce the building. Who are the real artists here, and what criteria will help us discover them?

Perhaps what we’re really experiencing is a cultural crisis of attribution.

Defend your calendar.

When preparing to launch a new site, avoid scheduling anything else. This may include saying no (or wait) to family and friends or that writing project you thought you would take on. (Following this tip could have saved me some extremely late nights this month.) It definitely should include postponing any new design projects, even though it’s tempting to think that since you’re already surrounded with graphics and code, it will be rather efficient to add a bit more to the stack. Beware! Despite having come a long way in the past five years, glitches and minor annoyances are common with today’s web browsers, not to mention the host of technologies you may be mashing up with your new site.

Line up additional eyes and ears.

Prompt a team of people to be ready to give you feedback as you near your launch. Fresh perspective is critical as you tweak and polish your site and content for a public launch. If it’s convenient, set up an email list or a group in your address book so you can fire off quick emails asking for feedback on your development site. Make this as simple as possible for you and for them. If you have the time, consider scheduling a face to face review where you can demonstrate the site using a projector or large screen and get immediate feedback before going live.

Use public notice templates.

Have some simple but elegant “public notice” templates in place in case you need to temporarily take down your site or “hide” certain portions of the site while the rest of it is live. Hold onto them because you may need to use them as you continue to tweak and polish the site. One of the most common reasons for launching a redesign is that the previous site is significantly outdated. If this is the case, consider putting together a very quick and simple site that keeps mission-critical information available, but also points to the coming redesign. Offer people a chance to contact you in multiple ways (email, phone) and consider putting a notification subscription box on the page so that site visitors can “sign-up” to be notified when the site goes public. Since I mention TypeKit in a slightly negative light later, here’s a great example of the kind of page I’m talking about. TypeKit has done nicely here.

Be willing to push back the launch date.

Unless there are compelling reasons to launch a site on a particular date, be willing to be flexible and communicate that possibility to your client throughout your development phase. Some site launch dates cannot be flexible. You have to know ahead of time the degree of flexibility inherent in your project. Do some risk assessment as early as possible (preferably before solidifying your project timeline). If a small project represents 20 hours of work, for instance, consider the possibility that deploying that third-party API could present an additional 20 hours of scrambling to smooth over integration glitches. Hopefully, all goes smoothly and the API integration only takes the five minutes you thought it would… but be prepared if it explodes on you.

Separate your essential features from your preferred ones.

If you know which features are absolutely essential to the launch and which ones could be implemented in the days and weeks that follow, you’ll be in a better place to handle unexpected diversions in your project’s roadmap. For instance, the new SDG site was slated to include TypeKit integration of the @font-face specification. However, the font rendering from TypeKit’s servers did not seem to work well or consistently across our site. It’s possible this is due to a limited understanding of how to properly integrate TypeKit, which is a new service released in beta right now. It’s also possible that the font files we chose from TypeKit are not properly formatted for consistent rendering. We searched for guidelines and contacted TypeKit for assistance, but in the end we had to pull the service and fall back on standard web fonts for the launch. TypeKit are clearly improving quickly, as this blog post demonstrates, and we hope to reintroduce TypeKit at SDG in a future phase. (Aside: I’m convinced that TypeKit has a very bright future for web designers and I’m grateful for their dedicated work in making the web a more beautiful place.)

Prepare your publicity channels.

Consider ahead of time who needs to hear about the launch and how that message can best reach them. If your communication collateral is ready to go at launch, then pulling the trigger on the site should cascade a series of communication triggers that will encourage people to pay attention (at least for a moment). Consider ways of capturing their ongoing attention with ways they can sign up for updates or news (or subscriptions to RSS feeds and podcasts) when they first visit. Those regular prompts will keep them coming back. In the case of the new SDG site, our primary publicity is tied to a future phase and not incorporated in the first launch. This is strategic for us, but probably not ideal for most projects.

Celebrate.

Find some appropriate ways to celebrate a launch, even if it is a quiet one. Gather some friends and family, your team, complete strangers and enjoy the fact that the web is now a more beautiful place than it was yesterday.

One of the things that I wonder thus far into the book, is whether my deep desire to work with teams of people comes ultimately from my experience of lonliness. Perhaps we shall see… I recommend that others pick up this book and take it seriously. If you’re reading it, or have read it, please feel free to comment here.

I am currently exploring the latest release of Drupal. I have at least two clients whose projects really call for an installation of a Content Management System or Framework. I have recently had much success with Wordpress, but others have warned me about some of its limitations. Drupal, they say, is the solution to these limitations; and they seem to be correct. Yet, for the end-user, I have yet to see anything that comes close to Wordpress. As I was describing to a colleague on Twitter earlier today, hand-coding sites is too time consuming for many projects, though the control and stability it offers in design is unparalleled. As I explored more about Drupal 6 today, I discovered a Ruby-based CMS called Radiant. The promise of such an application is exciting, but its current iteration leaves a lot of code hanging out of the core so it is not yet very user-centered. I intend to keep my eye on this development though.

The professor with whom I am working related a story about his young daughter who stole a bag of seashells from school one day. The teacher saw her do it and phoned her father. When she came home, she happily announced that she had found the bag of shells in the street on her way home. After admiring the shells, her father asked her again where she got them and then gave her an opportunity to tell the truth. Hanging her head, she did, and her father phoned the teacher back. They walked back to the school together, holding hands, and her father could sense her intense fear of facing the teacher. They did it together and when the teacher saw the girl, she bent down on one knee and opened her arms wide. The child ran to the teacher and embraced her and gave her back the bag of shells. It was a beautiful picture of God’s grace and love, and that God is able to remove our sin from us.

The class session also included two Nooma videos by Rob Bell. One of them, Lump (NOOMA 010), had me missing my son. It contained a similar message as the professor’s story, but was much more dramatically compelling for me because it reminded me of my own life as a child and inspired me to be the best father I can be for my children.