Form and Function

The other day, while I was surfing one of the design forums I frequent, some one posted a link to an article called The Surprising Truth about Ugly Websites. If you like feeling industrially undermined and marginalized, read it. If you are trying to justify having not so much as Googled the word "design" before uploading your electronic dry-heave of a website, read it. But don't read what's below. This guy would have you believe function cannot exist if form exists. Form and Function are not mutually exclusive and anyone who says so is selling discount services to pay off gambling debts. That writer is saying beauty cannot be simple and simplicity can only exist where there is no beauty. Preposterous. If he told that to God, He'd thunder down a belly laugh that would make his face glow brighter than a post-commandments Moses. The idea is inconsistent. If the wisdom of function over form is true for websites, it has to be true for everything. Imagine our world without it. If function was all that mattered, all that sold, then why don't we all drive the same car? One car. One color. Function galore! Only a handful of assembly plants would be needed and only one kind of machine would be needed to make it. In fact, let's don't even paint them. It's only one more step we can eliminate. What about clothes? Why not have one type of garment, in one color, for everyone? We would only need one pattern and we could do away with that awful functionality killer: dye. Never mind creation. Sincerely, look to God for the answer to this form/function riddle. He did it with all of creation; the Universe is a seething, pulsing, chugging, steam-belching train called The Evidence of the Existence of Balance in Form and Function; it's bright red and charging through space and time, wheels spinning with a rhythmic FUNC-TION-N-FORM-N-FUNC-TION-N-FORM! Utilitarianism is only ever adopted out of convenience, and it is never committed to. Believe that.