I suppose that after all this I should just shrug and say, Listen, they got what they want, they're happy, they paid the bill, let it go. But no, off I go, muttering under my breath that it could've been better and clients could be so much happier if they'd just listen to me.

In my experience the chief reason that work goes wrong at this confluence is that much creative work is accomplished outside of time, while current management practices measure time and then discount it.

When business looks at any aspect of itself it tends to see according to criteria it can measure. People who run businesses tend to feel that only what can be measured is really useful, and what can't be is too woolly to mean much. And the units of measurement that best works for them is...of course, time. With money as an alternate expression.

There's no question that time and money do work very well as a measure of some things, but they work best after the fact, when the results are in and the numbers can be used for evaluation and projection. In other words, they measure what has happened, not what might. So they don't work nearly as well when the creative work of making advertising and marketing materials is actually being done, and they don't really work at all when evaluating the things will make an ad or brochure or website or commercial perform--things like quality, clarity, impact, freshness, esthetics. One can measure the effectiveness of an ad, but one can't really measure why it is effective, not in units of time or money. I think that the creative aspects of commercial work are perhaps only gauged by things like a feeling in the gut, a glow, a sense that things just...look right.

In short, creative work is right and done when its makers--the designers, illustrators, writers, directors, editors, account people--know it is. And that may not happen on an exact schedule--by the end of the day of shooting, or by the investors meeting or the media deadline, or any other time. We can recognize that something has come together and is good, but we can't say beforehand when it will do so.

So good commercial art, just like good fine art, is done when it's done. But let's be realistic. When one projects, for purposes of planning and budgeting, that something like a brochure is going to be created, one has to commit to a deadline. There's no other way. And the timeline is part of the plan at the beginning.

The trouble is that the time that is so crucial for the out-of-time aspects of this work, the creative aspects where the real effectiveness is determined, has been pecked away so severely over the past few years that the quality of work is getting harder and harder to uphold. Efficiency and cost-cutting have become a near-religion in business. I you want to be a corporate, a sure way is to jump on costs, squeeze them down, and be seen to do it. It's as though a band of prehistoric hunters decided to focus in maintaining its mastodon quota while using 20% fewer spears.

Now of course there are lots of good reasons for management to cut costs, but there are also reasons to know when stop. In a business such as ours, where certain immeasurable qualities count, you can cut to the bone, but you can't cut bone. I think a lot of our clients don't understand where bone begins, at least not in the area of creativity.

The creative work that we do for business is done through the processes of art, and it gets its particular magic from them, so its worth taking those processes apart a bit to get some idea of how art does what it does.

Basically, art uses strange, illogical, arcane methods to manifest what can't be arrived at any other way. As the poet Charles Wright put it, "I write to find out what it is I have to say." Artists start each session of work with an impulse, but with no idea of exactly what will happen. They can plan, make notes, and sketches, they can previsualize, but when they begin, the big question in their mind's is How will this play out, where will it go? They don't really know. At its best the work that they do will take them beyond what they had in mind. At it's worst nothing at all will happen.

So they slide around the paint or the words, they make strings of notes to see where the string will lead them. They walk around and watch someone in the street to see if they can slip into his head and become him long enough to steal his consciousness. They gaze into blank air and hope something will materialize, that perhaps the clouds will suggest a composition or an atmosphere. The writer Annie Proulx says she visualizes a landscape and then waits to see who will walk out of it and follows him.

They leave the world of the everyday and go into their imaginations, where time doesn't exist.

Then something begins to happen (when it happens), either in a hot burst or a slow incremental laying down of a line. And when enough of the line is laid down, the work of revision commences. Many say that this is where the real work is done, that the heart of writing, for example, is rewriting. One listens to the words, looks at the lines, the colors, looks at the way the design jumps page to page, screen to screen, how fast, what is revealed, in what order. The work is manifested, refined, reenvisioned, refined again, until it is brought to its finish. This is not a work of technique or of facts. (In commercial art the facts have probably been handed off to us in a meeting.) This is a work of finding the rhythm--musical/visual/verbal--that picks the audience up and carries it along. As Wallace Stevens said, "Music is feeling, not sound." I think about this whenever I see technique layered over emptiness. (I had a client ask if I could do that thing, "y'know, where you put it all out of focus." No reason, just something he'd seen that he liked.)

What the creative person does with the material of his work, whether it is a work of fiction or an illustration for an advertising concept, is to take it in, breathe it down into his own being, and then pour it out again in what is known as the heuristic process.

I first encountered this word heuristic in a poetry class, and although the teacher didn't explain it, I knew it was important by the way she savored the sound of it. So I ran off after class and looked it up. It comes from the same Greek root as the word, Eureka, "I have found it," and it means taking something in and finding the truth of it within one's self. The heuristic process let's one speak with deep feeling about the beauty of a sunset. Without that process it is a borrowed emotion without any power, a cliché. With it one's thoughts become compelling and true.

So it's a complex process that takes place out of anyone's sight, and anyone who has worked in any art form understands that there is absolutely no way to predict how long it might take to complete it. And anyone who has worked in an agency or design firm knows that it would be pure insanity to say so at a client meeting.

For of course the process we use in the commercial arts is this same miraculous and inexact one. It's central to all creative work that we do in business. When it is followed an allowed to happen, the work that comes from it tends to be what we agree to call good.

But wait. Does commercial work have to be good? Is that important? Let's face it, to a lot of people it's not. There are other ways to do business. I heard of a manager who began a meeting about a new project by writing on a board the phrase, "Great is the enemy of good." What he meant was, let's get this one out the door quickly, it only has to be so good, and any effort beyond that will slow us down and not pay us back.

Surely he was right. But his definition of good was one that was entirely measured in time and in money. What a contrast with a statement I read recently by the writer James Salter, who said, "The secret of making art is to eliminate anything that is good enough."

Still, I know what I know what the man meant, and I have to think this way myself, as does anyone in our business. But I fear that the time squeeze of the productivity obsession has insinuated itself into my life in ways I'm not aware of. Still, I always try to achieve what a scientist might call an elegant solution in my projects. I do things that I know most people don't notice, particularly with light and the energy of the frame.. I think of it as quality. And I want it to be a characteristic of my work, not an extra. I force this issue as much as I can.

Of course, some businesses go after and customers in ways that have nothing to do with quality. I know a printer who set up a photography studio and operates it at a loss simply to channel work to his printing presses. Can I compete with that? Why should someone come to me?

They come if they want "good", if they want someone who cares enough to go through this artistic process with their projects. Those of us who long ago caught a case of the Arts are compelled to find the life in things and express it. We live in the matrix of balances that is called esthetics. We can't walk past a table setting without straightening a fork that is crooked.

So yes, doing good work is important. It's certainly the kind of work I want to do. That's the corner of this business I have always headed for. I just want people to say about me, "He does good work." The trouble arises when I commit to going through the process and getting results, then find there is nothing like enough time to do it well, to take in and really understand and restate the ideas that are the heart of the project.

Or perhaps I may find I am working in tandem with someone who simply has no concept of this process. As a photographer I spend increasing amounts of time these days executing layouts that have been Photoshopped together from disparate elements without regard to how they ever might actually go together in time and space, let alone in the mind. Long before I'm involved colors are chosen simply to ready a comp for a meeting, and having been presented to a client they can never be considered again. On one mad day I spent six hours trying to match the colors in a color Xerox of a marker comp simply because the representative of the client knew she couldn't return with anything that was different in any way from what the boss had seen. It was an insane pursuit. The result in the end seemed a stunning accomplishment to me, not because it was any good but because the match was so exact. But the piece itself was so bland I couldn't possibly show it to anyone.

(Listen to this! During the same shoot the same boss told me over the phone how a prism should effect light. I had a prism in front of me, and a light, and they just weren't doing what he said they should be, but still he argued and argued. Sometimes it's not business, it's hubris.)

But let's say that we're not so constricted by this kind of constipated rigidity. Let's say that we really are expected to do a certain amount of exploration during the course of our work. We can do a real exploration, within the process of manifest-refine-manifest that leads to a perfected work, made as good as it can be made. Or we can be made to do a kind of phony exploration that produces a variety of versions in the blind hope that whoever is making the final selection will like at least one of them.

This happens all the time now. It's become the way people work. I recently did a project in which I had a few hours in a facility to come up with an image that suggested an ability to safeguard large amounts of crucial data. The facility was a computer room, and it was cramped and not overly exciting, but I knew that with some lighting work I could come up with a strong, dynamic image.

And I did. But rather than consider how to refine and refine it into something stronger, I had to move on to make two other completely different images. The reason was that we were in that common position of not having the full trust of the corporate client. And the solution was to make several different images in the hope that he'd like one. If we had come back with a single image, and if he just didn't like at all, we would have failed, no matter how refined the image we'd done was. But if we had a few images, even if he didn't like any of them all that much, he might still like one more than the others, and we'd be home free.

Of course it is true that at an early stage of any project one should take the time to try this and try that for a while, just to see what might emerge. But eventually one needs to commit to the approach that seems most promising and give one's energy to working it through, to manifesting and exploring it's subtleties. I'm convinced that the very act of hard, concentrated focusing actually makes things happen, refinements and rhythms that make something move and sing. One works, then stands back to look, and suddenly one sees just what one should be doing. Why can't one just see it in the first place? I don't know. It just seems that the hard work, and the standing back, are necessary to reveal it.

If you recall, the early promise of the computer in design was that it would shorten some tasks and leave more time for creative speculation. But we all know how that has worked out. I recently watched as an agency created four different layouts, fully comped with clip art and kerned type, and then made color outputs to present to a client for a preliminary discussion of a project. The time required to make these comps was much greater than the time that would have been needed to do the few roughs that were all that was needed at an early stage. I mean, fussing the type on a preliminary comp! And where did the time come from? I fear it was subtracted from the time spent later on in the process where it could have done some good.

One might argue that the work burden had shifted forward, and that the chosen layout had a shorter path to production because of the work done up front. But I'd say that that work on the comps was done to come up with something/anything for a meeting. It was not the real focused, purposive work that makes something really good. I think that in this case the productivity model ate the contemplation time that the computer promised.

Is the result of all of this better work? I don't know anyone who would argue that it is. Look at the work in the CA photography annual. The unpublished category is one of the largest and contains some of the most interesting work by far. I'm grateful that this kind of work has a showcase, but I can't help but notice that the work forged in the agency/design area often lacks the sheen and fire of the work in the unpublished category.

So it is so that at times we're completely cut off from the process by which we do good work, simply because the time it needs gets used up in empty tasks. We've all experienced this, and when it happens I just mutter and push on.

And occasionally the artistic process finds the room to breathe. I initiated a project with an agency, a kind of self-assigned promotion for them, for me. We began a few years ago, but it kept getting stalled. The design firm would get a big project and our work would go straight to the back burner. Then when time allowed we'd pull it out and work on it some more, but then we ran into annual report season and everything ground to a halt again.

So it went, more off than on. But each time we resumed work we did so with new eyes for what we had done to that point, and we were able to give up some things that weren't really working and to come up with some new things that did. As of this writing it is about to go on press, and it has, in its frustrating way, insisted on its right to be treated as an artistic undertaking. I'm sure it will come out better than the projects that kept displacing it.

But its not a solution we can count on to work. What are some solutions? We can say, "I can't work like this, I'm an artist!" and flounce off.

We can offer to arm wrestle the comptroller for twice the time or half.

Or we can simply ask for the time we need, and if it's not offered, we can decide whether or not to do the project. I mentioned to a designer friend that I'd turned down some projects that didn't allow a realistic amount of time to do them right. She said that she wasn't far enough along to turn things down, and I knew what she meant, but the truth is that saying to yourself what you won't do is a big step toward doing the work you want to do.