I'm doing a lot of web-based stuff at work lately. (In case you cared: I'm making read-only event calendars from CorporateTime via an app I wrote which produces XML; various XSLT sheets and a Java servlet produce HTML and printable PDFs and such from that output and this is what people see and what they see is what I'm talking about). So I'm back into the whole game of meeting with people who decide feature sets and the "look-and-feel" of things. It's oddly surreal, since I've been doing that off and on for the past 8 years in one form or another. This time is different, though. Maybe since I was pretty much on the server end of things for so long, I see the presentation end as being somewhat whimsical. I dunno.

Anyway, I've been meeting with people who could be considered the "Marketing Department" of the school where I work. I've noticed that no matter where you go, you see the same thing happen over and over: Most people would rather add to an existing widget than make a new one (or attempt to create even part of one).

If you ask 100 people to come up with how they all want a design to look, you either get no responses or your get a 1000 ideas. But if you go and make your best guess, you always get those 1000 ideas. It must be easier to create a thing when a framework for it is already built than to create the framework as well as the guts of the thing. Maybe that's why so few people are painters, or why so many painters paint things they can already see. But for what I do, things usually go like this:

"How do you want it to look?"

"Oh, you know... with a thing here and a thing at the bottom is fine."

"That's it?"

"Yeah, we just want something basic. You know what we want."

"OK..."

... after the whole deal is completed ...

"Well, what do you think?"

"I like it, but can I have an extra thing here, and wouldn't a side thing look nice, and I'd like that thing at the top to also be blue, but except if they are upper management, when it should be red... and oh yeah, the one guy said that the thing on the bottom has to be smaller so that needs to change..."

It's always the same no matter where you go.