Finding the Website in the Pixels

Don't get me wrong. I love being a right-brained person. But sometimes I envy the left-brained... at least when it comes to client-based work.

The left-brainer does work that is objective, is usually based on both empirical data and some kind of mathematical equation, and can be understood by most if not all who experience it. There's also little need for the employment of flowery language to explain the left-brainer's work. Furthermore, because it's so dry [a good thing in this context], 80% of those who encounter it [and must give feedback on it] can do so without fumbling, without emotion, and [add beatbox riff here] without frustration or consternation towards the explanation of his communication within the situation of the left-brainer's creation. Word.

Not so with the work of the right-brained. Though right-brainers do in fact use data, mathematics, and logic to create what we create [no, seriously, we do], we are by and large directed by [fill in this blank with such ambiguous phrases as Our Muse, The Spirit, or Creative Juices], and the resultant product is consequently steeped so deeply in subjectivity that the only way to explain how we did what we did is with professional sounding terms such as "Color Theory", "The Rule of Thirds", "The Golden Ratio" [or "The Golden Mean"] and a lot of emotional hemming and hawing. I'd rather not have to tax my memory and vocabulary that much when what would actually explain my work best would be phrases like "It feels right", and "It's visually balanced", and "Shut up, I like it this way".

If it weren't for the fact that the art I create is based on pixels and is laid out on a grid, I'd be as lost for explanation of my work as Michelangelo must have felt when explaining his statue of David. He came up with something brilliantly poetic: "I saw the angel in the marble, and carved until I set him free." Not sure what my clients would say if I suggested: "I saw your website in the pixels, and deleted until I set it free."