But you're conflating two different roles. Actually, the point you're making works perfectly to disprove what Dustin wrote.
The producer is not an artistic role, he's a business one. Most producers are a lot smarter than you'd give them credit for, but they ignore their artistic sensibilities and focus on the bottom line. Before you get to them, you have lots of brilliant collaboration: Directors and writers and cinematographers and directors of photography and sound editors and actors, of course actors, all dance together and form really incredible things in tandem. Very rarely is a single voice dictating. Even in the case of the great auteurs there's collaboration: See how David Lynch works in tandem with Angelo Badalamenti on most of his projects. So that all works perfectly, right till you hit the business people.
Dustin's writing from the assumption that making a web site is all about the design. He's treating web sites like you're treating film. And, like you, he's assuming that the reason AA's web site sucks is that the artists are terrible at their jobs, and he's railing blindly at them, when in fact the people in charge aren't tasteless so much as they don't care about taste as much as the artists do.
I actually wrote an off-the-cuff post about this a little while ago regarding the music industry, how problems in perception start because we don't realize just how much more important business is than art for most companies/people: http://marinich.tumblr.com/post/200996589/talentless
I actually agree with you there -- the people in charge don't care about taste. But I think one aspect is that experience is the product. And the people in charge should care. They should care a lot, and it's why Virgin and Jetblue and Southwest eat AA's lunch.
The website is only one aspect of a panoply of experiential factors that the management of AA should care about. It is their product. It's their reason for being. But they don't care.
And I think for Dustin, that is the problem he's calling attention to.
That's why I'm sort of conflicted about this argument. On the one hand, I think AA's web site is a shitty mess. On the other, I don't know enough about AA to know that their web site's what's bringing them down, and I wouldn't be surprised if their current site was somehow very effective. Look how many people go to see Michael Bay films. People like bad things. This might be an instance of a bad thing that lots of people for whatever reason use.
The other side of the problem was also illustrated here, which was that Dustin provided a very shallow analysis at first, and that analysis hasn't gotten much deeper. His take on things moved from "the designers know nothing" to "the CEO knows nothing". I suspect he knows even less about business than he does about design. It further irks me that at no point in this conflict has he said "I'm sorry that I said some stupid things; let me rephrase myself." Instead it's "This guy makes some good points but I'm still in the right." It's as smug and insincere as his shallow article designs that get so lauded.
(At that, I think I'm gonna bow out of this argument, at least for tonight. The snippy emails Dustin sent me in response to one of my comments is making me look only at the flaws in his logic, so I don't think I'm being as bipartisan as I'd like to be. Because I won't be able to edit this in the morning, I'm sorry if I came across as a dick in this discussion; I really enjoyed having this debate.)
The producer is not an artistic role, he's a business one. Most producers are a lot smarter than you'd give them credit for, but they ignore their artistic sensibilities and focus on the bottom line. Before you get to them, you have lots of brilliant collaboration: Directors and writers and cinematographers and directors of photography and sound editors and actors, of course actors, all dance together and form really incredible things in tandem. Very rarely is a single voice dictating. Even in the case of the great auteurs there's collaboration: See how David Lynch works in tandem with Angelo Badalamenti on most of his projects. So that all works perfectly, right till you hit the business people.
Dustin's writing from the assumption that making a web site is all about the design. He's treating web sites like you're treating film. And, like you, he's assuming that the reason AA's web site sucks is that the artists are terrible at their jobs, and he's railing blindly at them, when in fact the people in charge aren't tasteless so much as they don't care about taste as much as the artists do.
I actually wrote an off-the-cuff post about this a little while ago regarding the music industry, how problems in perception start because we don't realize just how much more important business is than art for most companies/people: http://marinich.tumblr.com/post/200996589/talentless