“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”
Eugene Delacroix, French Romantic painter (1798 - 1863)

I have never been a proponent of reproducing a photograph as a peice of art. Don’t get me wrong, I think it takes painstaking talent to create a painting that is indistinguishable from the original photo, but a stamp of originality, to me, is what makes art. So, you might ask, what has this got to do with web sites and graphic design? Well, my answer is of all the tens of millions of websites that are out there, a site you design should have some ’stamp’ of originality, be it an influence that appears in it’s implementation or an authenticity of some feature.

The challenge is keeping a sense of the clients’s business objectives  and finding the audience your client is appealing to. In my experience, it’s a rare client that understands their audience. Many times I’ve gotten the answer ” I’m appealing to everyone…staff, information seekers, new customers and returning customers”.  So our job as designers becomes helping the client visualize a functional design. For example, a good response might be: “Ok, let’s take new customers first. What kind of information is a new customer  looking for?” and ” What kind of information will your staff be looking for? “, etc. Usually, this interaction will narrow down the scope and the client begins to visualize a realistic picture of the sites function and appeal.