Most of last week we spent reassessing and discussing an optimization of our biestmilch.com website. With its plenty of content it reminds me of a monster that needs taming again and again. Notions were swaying from functionality at the one far end to beauty and elegance of pure logic on the other. We tried to find our way trough, and we decided to disclose the Pandora box again, and our Biest Magazine definitely had transformed into very tightly closed box. Google analytics gave us the undeniable proof. To make a long story short, I currently start re-doing the thing again, or better re-adjust it with this feeling that it is to the better and that it is necessary to do so, and that it will be preliminary again. Some weeks ago I seemed happy with what I just had got. My view on my own stuff changes fast, keeps me moving all the time 
. Off we go, let’s see what the result is going to be.
I just found a blog post that encourages me to go ahead and to come out with a beta-version of the site very very soon. As my post title already indicates, it is about the »elegance of imperfection«. David Sherwin wrote this post in which he introduces the paradigm for pursuing elegance through imperfection by referring to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi.
To give you an idea of what he means, here is an example: A Zen master is staying with a priest at a temple close to Kyoto. The priest is having guests over that evening, and he has spent much of the day in the garden—shaping the moss, plucking weeds, and gathering up the leaves in tidy arrangements, all in order to achieve the state of perfection the temple builders had originally designed.
“Isn’t it beautiful,” the priest asked the master…
The master nodded. “Yes…your garden is beautiful; but there is something missing…”
The old gentleman walked slowly to a tree growing in the center of a harmonious rock and moss combination. It was autumn and the leaves were dying. All the master had to do was shake the tree a little and the garden was full of leaves again, spread out in haphazard patterns.
“That’s what it needed,” the master said.
The simplicity of wabi-sabi is best described as the state of grace arrived at by a sober, modest, heartfelt intelligence. The main strategy of this intelligence is economy of means. Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don’t sterilize. (Things that are wabi-sabi are emotionally warm, never cold.) Usually this implies a limited palette of materials. It also means keeping conspicuous features to a minimum. But it doesn’t mean removing the invisible connective tissue that somehow binds the elements into a meaningful whole.