Boredom.

If you ask me how I'm doing, there's a very good chance you will hear the word bored. While I have a very well documented case of Nerd ADD, that's only part of it. Oh, sure, part of it is because I might be a little bit off (to quote my wife), but there's something deeper than that.

(In case anyone from my day job happens to read this, it's not about job satisfaction.)

There's a sad truth about my working life: my job is my hobby. I like doing the visual design stuff. I like making Flash do fun things. I like floundering helplessly with PHP.

Ok, not so much with the floundering, but the point is the same.

So, I want to enjoy every moment of my work day as much as I enjoy my other hobbies – drawing, reading, working on my house, taking photographs, painting, printing T-shirts, and playing video games. Sadly, that's not the reality of web design (or any job, I suspect). Most of my day is spent changing minute details on massive sites, or making theoretically simple graphical changes, and in general doing the grunt work of making a website work. The fun creative part of a website is a small portion of the process.

But why bored? Well, the fun stuff is so entrancing, and the warm glow you get from seeing someone randomly link a site you made, or talk about how they're so happy a feature was added to a site that you work on, that the day-to-day stuff just doesn't seem able to compete.

Part of it is the high profile of microsite work. We've all seen them – a game or 3 page promo site for some cool shoes, or a new car. These are the sort of cool things that win awards. They are probably a ton of fun to work on. But they're the Beanie Babies of the internet. Bright, colorful, popular for a time... and then rotting away in the attic. I wonder if Nike feels stupid for spending money on that Nike Air Max site that Big Spaceship did a while back. I wonder how much money they paid for some looping video with pretty background effects. I wonder how many people saw that site, and how many of them weren't from the web design community, which drooled over it for the span of a couple months.

Working on full websites or web applications is definitely less sexy, and more of a strain on creatives. There's still some sexiness out there - see RGA's work on Nike Plus or Fantasy Interactive's work, and a lot of other solid work from places like Huge (no, I'm not including my own workplace in this list). But these sites are long, hard work. And they're built to last and to be used by millions of people, over and over, with complex interaction.

Because they're a ton of work spread out over a long period, those of us who cut our teeth on insane deadlines and juggling multiple projects can, simply put, feel like we're going slightly crazy. Because we're artists, and we love what we do, and we have Nerd ADD, or one of a few dozen things... well... we get bored easily. But it doesn't change our desire to make our projects look as nice as possible.