‘I asked for a ****ing big button! Where the **** is my big button?!?’ thundered my CEO, his face shifting seamlessly from its usual pale and unhealthy complexion to an alarming red.

The atmosphere in the office changed abruptly; we scrambled back to our desks and, as one, focussed our attention rigidly on our screens. Our lead web designer winced and turned to our CEO with an expression of pain and annoyance.

A few minutes earlier, our web designer had sat back in his seat and proudly invited us to come over and admire the fruits of his labour. We quickly jostled over and examined his final draft of the company’s latest retail website. Like a latter day Michelangelo he had been earnestly chipping away at it for the last few months, balancing the colour scheme, making the buttons subtle and unobtrusive and endeavouring to make it as appealing as possible. He was of an artistic temperament and had spent much time and effort thinking about his design and how best to realise it. We could all see that he had succeeded wonderfully. The finished product had avoided all the pitfalls of web design; it was un-cluttered, modern looking and pleasing to the eye. As we were admiring his handiwork, we suddenly felt a menacing presence and turned to see our CEO peering over our shoulders.

Our CEO was a pensive looking chap in his late forties, with a jittery manner and what is commonly referred to in business as a ‘no nonsense attitude’, and everywhere else as ‘rudeness’. He had roughly the same approach to people management as General Patton, and the sensitivity to match. Memos drafted to him had to be a maximum of two sentences or they would be tossed derisorily into the recycle bin. The battle for creative control was about to begin.

‘I thought I should scale the buttons down from how they appeared on your specification’ explained the web developer. He stopped to ponder how best to continue without causing offence, then elaborated, ‘I thought they seemed a bit…obtrusive’.

Our CEO gave an affronted snarl, ‘Obtrusive, of course we want them to be ****ing obtrusive, we want the customers to press the ****ing Buy button; that’s why I asked you to make them as big as possible!!’

They both turned to look at the design on the screen, the mood gradually darkening.

‘You can’t do that; you can’t treat the customers like idiots’, the web designer exclaimed boldly.

This was met with a snort of annoyance by my CEO who turned abruptly and marched back to his office. ‘Not good enough’ he shouted as he departed, rubbing salt into an already festering wound.

Minutes later the inevitable email arrived in the designer’s inbox. In amongst its numerous expletives were a series of bullet points; each one punctuated by a ferocious chain of exclamation marks. As our developer scanned the list he let out sighs of exasperation and displeasure. He left the office that evening a broken man.  

Over the next few days he began the task of defacing his masterpiece bit by bit. The buttons were relentlessly expanded and daubed with flashing slogans .The subtle colours were abandoned and the page quickly became cluttered with streams of incoherent marketing text, violating the rules of both grammar and logic. As a final indignity, a stock art photo, carefully selected by our CEO, was inserted in the top right hand corner. This airbrushed image depicted an improbably wholesome looking family and resembled an illustration from a Jehovah’s Witness magazine. The awkward smiles etched across their faces looked like they had been extracted at gunpoint by Phil Spector. When it was finished, the new site had all the subtlety of a red light district.

Upon launch of the website, the tracking statistics made for depressing reading. Judging from the bounce rate, visitors were arriving at a decent rate but departing in disgust almost instantly. As the marketing budget began to drain faster than the Zimbabwe treasury, the recriminations and soul searching began. In a fit of hubris, our CEO decided that the only way to reverse the decline was to produce an elaborate flash movie, with him as the star. He felt sure that his presence on the site would be enough to tip the balance and compel visitors to press his beloved Buy button.

To forestall this, we decided to do a quick audit of the internet to see which sites were attracting the most traffic. The truth quickly dawned. The websites that were most successful and had the most loyal fan base were also the plainest, the ugliest and the most visually inept. In contrast, the ones with flashy marketing and expensive looking animations were left forlorn, hopeless and abandoned. We duly reported this back to him. ‘Right, that’s it!’ he exclaimed before storming off to his office and frenziedly typing another uncouth email.

A month later, our lead web designer sat back to contemplate the depressing compromise that was the latest draft of the site. This time he felt no pride in his creation. The buttons were still large, but rendered plain and uninteresting. The slogans were still there but they no longer flashed alarmingly back at the user. The site was functional and minimalist but oddly joyless. We shuffled over, murmured a few belated congratulations and then went back to work.

In the realm of business, artistic taste and creativity will inevitably lose out. So it was that Botticelli was forced to paint his pompous Medici patrons into his nativity, and Michelangelo’s daring nudes were defused by his employers with strategically placed robes. By all means let the artistic muses guide you, but be under no illusions: it’s the philistine who always gets the final say.