Creativity in Design and Development; What's your take?

sepia, whats your process like?

I think designing for the web is more of a trade/craft than an artistic process, at least when you think of your everyday "need to ultimately sell smth" website. Mainly you are creating an interface, something that creates a connection between the user and whatever it is your website is doing. Like the dashboard of a car - you wouldn’t look for art in that, even though they can have different levels of sophistication.
Art is smth that stands for itself.

This being said, creativity is a vital part of design, as well as of the technical side of development. The evolution of Flash is a nice example of creativity - it started out with a fairly limited set of capabilities. But because it was a great tool for developing visual experiences, it had a community with a strong design background as well as great coders. And through the years people kept pushing its limits in ways that the makers of Flash would never have dreamed of. Unfortunately it is also a great example in another way, because in all their creativity people forgot to learn or use the rules that make good user experiences.

This, btw, is how i got into web development - i was studying fine art and via Photoshop came to the web (which back then ofttimes was was called "the information highway", thank god that’s past) and so to designing and development. I never really expressly learned the basic rules of web design and was too excited about the creative possibilities of all that flash to care much about them. So, while having created a few rather unique and sometimes quite nice websites i never became a proficient web designer. So ultimately i ditched the designing and concentrated completely on the coding part, which reminds you very often and clearly not to neglect its set of rules.

So, sorry for rambling about myself - in short: creativity is a vital part both of design and development. In both parts if you know the basic rules you can be confident to get some solid results. And if you add excellence to it you sometimes get great examples of creative engineering like that mean machine they call MODX.

I think that UI design and visual design are two separate skills, though obviously they are related in a truly great site design. There are beautiful sites that are very difficult to use and vice versa (see amtrak.com). My suspicion is that natural artistic talent is a bigger factor in the latter.

I’ve done a lot of work with user interfaces for computer programs and I consider myself a skilled UI designer. When it comes to visual design, however, I’m mostly faking it. It involves not only creativity, IMO, but a particular kind of creativity that I don’t have much talent for. I do fine at creative work involving music or the written word, but when it comes to the visual arts, I’m severely handicapped.

I have to admit that I’m also fairly lazy about visual design for my own sites. I’d much rather work on the content than spend time making the site attractive or keeping up with the latest trends in how a site should look.

As for developer skills, I think experience is the biggest factor. I’m orders of magnitude better at this than I used to be just because I’ve been doing it for so long. It’s like playing chess, eventually you develop the ability to look several moves ahead and see how a particular development choice will affect other parts of the system.

I think "creativity" needs some natural talent to begin with - you can’t teach a blind man to see (he can try by using other senses, but he’ll never be fully capable).

When you have that (at least a bit to start of with), you can start learning the rules that apply to the situation and be creative around that box.

As long as you don’t stray away too far from the rules you will be fine, but like a lot in life taking the jump can go up or down: an amazing result, or being squashed into the ground.


When looking at it like that, there’s no real difference between design & development, is there? Though for development the natural talent could be logical thinking or liking maths, whereas design may need some skill in visual art or a rich imagination.

Quote from: redtoad at Apr 28, 2011, 01:55 PM

sepia, whats your process like?

Here goes In a perfect world, my process is as follows:
1. Meet with client, interview, lunch, move into their house whatever it takes to try to understand their business, where they’re coming from, what they like/don’t like, their favorite colors etc etc. ANYTHING and everything that helps me get into their head. I try to assume their "character" or personality whenever I work on their file. If I don’t know them that well, then I’m guessing or making it up, which I don’t like. I want to be confident I know them.
2. Brainstorm, mostly on paper. Key words that describe their business including the business name form the basis of a flow-of-consciousness kind of splurging of ideas/concepts in paper. Sometimes I just wander around doing my other activities thinking about their project. Sleeping on it is amazing for brainstorming/creative process!!!
3. Hand drawn "wireframe". I use that term loosely because it usually looks like something my 2 year old drew. But it gives me an idea of where I’m going.
4. Photoshop - I’m playing around with skipping this step. Check out: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/designing-in-browser-a-manifesto/
Mostly I still make a mock-up in PSD so I can send it to the client quickly for feedback. But sometimes, if I’m given the freedom, I just start templating in MODX off the "wireframe" and show it to the client when it’s sort of working. Still trying to work this out....I may go back to just using Photoshop in the end - I mean all the graphic elements come from there anyways, so I still have that window open.
5. Add content. I usually end up doing content creation for my clients. This takes a LONG time but if I know them (see #1) then it makes it WAY easier.
6. Get feedback. Make adjustments in conjunction with #7....
7. Test. I must admit I don’t like this part at all. I usually find all kinds of things I don’t like. I need help in this area for sure. Thinking about dusting off my Windows machine to test natively in IE w/dev tools cuz everything else I’ve tried sucks.

And that’s it. I usually have long-term relationships with my clients (just converted my first retainer gig ) so I keep on their file, making improvements, suggest changes, etc. Communication is key for me.

There. More than anyone probably wanted to know

thanks sepia... no I am always interested in how others work. I borrow any and all things to improve.

I think designing in a browser will never work for me but have tried it. I do simple things in a browser. I do the gray box wireframes of each template in Illustrator and call them "content maps" and go from content/UI choices to design. On a content map I will work out snippets, TV’s etc.

Mark, I kind of agree with you.

<<As for developer skills, I think experience is the biggest factor. I’m orders of magnitude better at this than I used to be just because I’ve been doing it for so long. It’s like playing chess, eventually you develop the ability to look several moves ahead and see how a particular development choice will affect other parts of the system. >>>

BobRay... I love that.

Itwillbeok: I love hearing about your journey from design to development...thank you for sharing that. I think it is really interesting to see "creatives" go to the dark side and vice versa (grin) I think there is a lot of fear it can’t be done and that is repressive.