Unicorn Depression

After weeks, sometimes months, of planning, designing, developing, and finally launching a website, I am often hit with a sort of postpartum depression. I used to think that this depression was born in the debugging process...particularly the debugging of CSS weirdness in certain browsers...or one in particular. I.E., wut? You make this pride-bearing design and then you have to 'make it work' in development...as if any styling issue questions the design's integrity.

But then, this most recent project didn't have a single styling issue, in part, because we had the 960 Grid System to depend on. So the debugging process on this project couldn't be blamed for the void I felt where the project had been.

Print projects are fraught with totally different but equally frustrating 'debugging' issues. But at the end of print projects I am not left with any of the same sort of deflation. Websites are such non-existent animals...unicorns. You know what one looks like, what it does, what it's good for, but you'll never see one step out from behind a tree. You'll never really be able to hand one to a friend or keep one on the shelf to pull out ten years later and still dig...at least not yet.

I still love a thing with texture...something that casts a shadow (one not measured in pixels). So after so much work, it's still a bit emotionally weird for me to have produced a unicorn. It might be useful and perhaps even beautiful, but in the end, momentary lights on a screen.

Stupid internet.

Dedicated.

Remember when things were so antiquated as to have dedicated buttons and screens that only displayed information.