Design: How far In - How far Out? Technical issues aside, the dilemma most often faced by our Clients is an aesthetic one: "How conservative or radical do we want our site to appear?" This is a problem faced by anyone working in any endeavor which is both commercial and artistic - at what point do you strike a balance between design which challenges and design which stultifies? Too far towards the former and you run the risk of rubbing your viewers just the wrong way. Too far towards the latter and your site is lost amid a sea of cranked out sausage machine sites. Commercial web site development is most often driven by concern for the bottom line. After all, the ultimate reason that most web sites are developed is to generate more business. Add to that the fact that site development projects typically involve several employees of the client - development by consensus - and you have a recipe for crippling creative self-censorship. In this situation, a process which started with the best intentions of involving many team members in the creative process can have the opposite effect of winnowing out the more creative or highly conceptual ideas. An innovative idea presented to the group will have detractors and supporters. Supporters of fresh, challenging ideas will offer support for the idea, but this support is often limited to "This idea appeals to me ," or "I feel like this idea really works." What else can they say? If the idea is truly innovative, there is no precedent for its success. On the other hand, concerns about an idea being too obscure or oblique are, in a sense, justified by the perceptions of the person bringing them up. "Well, this ad lost me - how many other people will it lose?" Just a few comments like that, and the entire group is looking for other, more obvious options. What many folks fail to realize, is that their audience is actually smarter than they are giving them credit. Viewers enjoy creativity, applaud humor, and appreciate implicit recognition of their intelligence. Even with television, the most popular shows are those that challenge, and take risks. Seinfeld has had tremendous success by using a brand of humor which uses viewer discomfort to great effect. What are the implications for web site design? There is no simple answer, but perhaps the best we can do is to approach our design projects with a committment to untethered creativity. Reasonable usability and production constraints aside, we start our design projects with no preset boundaries. How ambitious can we be with our designs before we've pushed them just too far?