I’m currently reading an absolutely amazing book called My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. On the surface its a murder mystery surrounding the death of a Turkish miniaturist in the 16th century. Yet, what makes the book such a treasure to read is its clever and insightful criticism of art, and the differences between Eastern and Western art forms. Its a distinction we’re rapidly loosing in the modern world, espeically, dare I say, online. Websites fall into the category of design (implying a sense of functionality, control, purpose) rather than art (in some way the opposite, though impossible to define). Yet should they? The answer is a topic for some more posts, but for now, consider this from the end of a chapter of My Name is Red titled “I Am a Tree”. It is a tree in a picture describing its existence:

A great European master miniaturist and another great master artist are walking through a Frank meadow discussing virtuosity and art. As they stroll, a forest comes into view before them. The more expert of the two says to the other: “Painting in the new style demands such talent that if you depicted one of the trees in this forest, a man who looked upon that painting could come here, and if he so desired, correctly select that tree from among the others.”

I thank Allah that I, the humble tree before you, have not been drawn with such intent. And not because I fear that if I’d been thus depicted all the dogs in Istanbul would assume I was a real tree and piss on me: I don’t want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning.

It seems that every day I’m faced with the same dilemma: do I spend most of my time working on regular, paid, contracts for clients, or, do I spend (initially) unpaid hours and hours developing my ‘Big Ideas’ for hopfully profitiable sites somepoint down the road?

The obvious answer is of course both. Anyone who’s read half the posts at www.lifehacker.com or similar knows that the key is in the balance. I need a regular income to pay the bills etc., even if some of the projects I do are less interesting or exciting than my own. Yet, the fun of web-design is often in trying to forfill that child-like dream of creating the uber-amazing-money-making website you’ve always dreamed of.

So in fact, the question is not which should I do more of, but how do I do both? We all know the grove we get into when a project is going well, up all night coding and inventing. It almost seems counter productive to stop and begin a totally new taks, spending an hour getting back to grips with it and so on.

Instead therefore, I fell into the trap of doing neither, but writing about it on my new shiny blog. Now what did that achieve?