Confessions of a Pixelfucker

I’m a manager and consultant now, but for a long time my official job title was User Experience Designer. Design is what I was supposed to be doing. It was supposed to be my highly professional and technical activity. But let’s be honest: What I was really doing was getting off.

I was a pixelfucker.

I was like a rabbit. I fucked every single pixel on your mockup. I fucked them up, down, and sideways, for hours on end. I spent way more time than necessary moving every single box on that web page up by ten pixels, one by one. Then back down again. Then back up.

I changed the width of that line from one pixel to two. Then to twelve. Then to fourty-eight. Then to eight. Back to twelve. Four. Twelve. Two. One. Two. Back to twelve again. Fuck it, one pixel.

Then I removed the line and aaah… much better!

Seventy-eight shades of grey were tried on that inactive button. Light grey, dark grey, greenish grey, blueish grey, teal-ish grey, white with grey noise, grey with white noise, brushed aluminium, high-transparency black, low-transparency white on a black background, semi-transparent white on brushed aluminium, even that strange bright olive brown that kind of feels like grey. Light grey was fine, right from the start, and I knew that. I just wanted to fuck around.

I was not making beautiful things so that I could get paid. No, in fact, I had been making beautiful things before I ever got paid for them, and I kept on making beautiful things on my free time too. I had to find a way to get paid to do it, because I didn’t want to do anything else. It’s all I wanted to do. I was addicted to it.

To pixelfucking.

I didn’t just make digital interfaces. I made sweet sweet love to digital interfaces. I ran my mouse pointer down the length of bezier curves, I tweaked their anchor points to made them twitch and shiver, whipping around like the loops of a rope.

I moved my Apple pencil’s tip in lazy circles around the color wheel, making the fill color blush from peach to red, orbit around orange, pulsate into purple.

I tarted up your nav’s background with garish drop-eyeshadow, with come-hither gradients, I made its tabs flash obscene mouse-over highlights, so that they screamed: “Click me baby! Ooh come on click me! Click me hard! Click me NOW!”

That’s what I did, while you were paying me to do design. I did it slowly, relentlessly, taking my time. I did it for endless hours, kundalini-style.

Those fifty-thousand bucks you paid me to design your in-store sales support mobile app? I blew half of it on pixelfucking.

The three months it took to iterate on our startup’s MVP? I pleasured myself with six different visual styles, each with its own typography, color schemes, and layout logic. You saw two of them, and you were surprised that it had to change. You have no idea how much design I splurged on, purely for the sake of my own enjoyment.

Did you notice that every piece of micro-content on this homepage, from the tagline, to the hero banner, to the call to action, to the footer links, all of them were haikus? No, you didn’t, because I didn’t mean for you to notice it. I did it for my own amusement. Yeah, see, when I was tired and shagged out from too much pixelfucking, I liked to wordfuck too.

That’s what I did with your money. I blew it on wild orgies of pixels and fonts. Your design and I got sweaty, we got down, we got low. Sometimes we were making love, most of the time we were just damn fucking.

And when you saw it, and thought it looked “fantastic”, and “amazing”, and “professional”… well, it should have. I poured my heart and soul into your design. We went incredible places together. We learned some deep dark secrets about each other, and about ourselves. We laughed, cried, bit, scratched, clawed and hung on to each other for breath, for sanity, for a touch of the divine, for dear life.

You didn’t know why you found it “sexy,” and that’s okay. You paid me to do my thing, to do what I do, and it was best done in private, far from prying eyes. Just know that I loved your design, and it loved me, and that what happened was sometimes sublime, sometimes beautiful, sometimes dirty, but never crass, never careless.

You paid me to “work my magic”, and so I did. It might have felt like it took a long time, but you loved the end result, that triumphant, exultant, smeared-mascara look of confidence that your design exuded. Don’t ask what took so long, don’t come knocking, don’t ask about what happened behind closed doors.

It’s pixelfucking. It’s better than sex. You wouldn’t understand.