Art At Work

I have the privilege(?) of working for a social networking site, where my main duty is to screen artists' skin designs they have submitted for acceptance into the public gallery. If you don't know, a skin is a way people can customize their little page within the site--like the custom themes you can use here on blogger, or sites like LiveJournal or MySpace. We receive countless submissions from people who want their art to be shown off on the site, and I usually end up going through several hundred skins each day. Most of them are crap. Not in the sense that they're not "artistic" enough, or they don't cater to my personal aesthetic tastes, but in the sense that the person who created the skin wasn't paying attention to the functional aspects of their designs. Such as choosing font colors that are legible (you have no idea how many black text on black background submissions we get); or using graphics that are so compressed and blurry that it becomes a game of "guess what you're looking at!" And since most of our users tend to be emo and/or twelve year old girls (or catering to that demographic), we tend to see a lot of pink, black, skulls and stars.
So it was completely unexpected when I came across a skin Monday afternoon that thrilled me right at first glance. It was done in varying flat shades of green, each section different from the one next to it; and vertically, down the sides of each section (the basic layout is basically a grid, with a large, screen wide box at the top, and two columns of of boxes varying in size depending on content extending to the bottom of the page directly below) was a box-like font also in green simply labeling the function of each section. Headers, footers, navigation, main modules--all were named the demarcation between each clean and simple. Here was Modern Art, staring out at me from my computer monitor. In its simplicity, the virtual object and structure of the skin became the focus of attention, instead of the frills slapped on top of it. It was like taking a blank canvas and simply writing "CANVAS" on it, or going around with a sharpie and labeling the objects in your daily life. Words are merely symbols used as placeholders for the actual things in our minds, and by physically attaching the word to the object in front of us, the word becomes the object and in a sense it is more solid and real.
I couldn't believe what I was looking at. Showing the skin to my coworker, I hoped she would be as excited as I was, since we're always looking for something different from the usual pink stars that predominate the gallery. She wasn't impressed. She thought it was more instructional in nature rather than decorative, and therefore not a proper match for the gallery. I suggested that she didn't recognize artistic genius. She countered that I'm pretty weird. She did have a point about the simplicity of the design though, and since the fairest way to deal with our submissions is by holding them to the same guidelines, I unfortunately had to reject this person's effort. Still, it was about the most exciting day art-wise that I've had since I started working there two months ago, and I hope to stumble across some more little gems in my daily work.