Holger's (@foobartel) post about this year's BeyondTellerrand Düsseldorf conference and the inspiration that transpires touches on a raw nerve for me.
(…) With so much sameness on the web these days, I would love to see more people dare, more creative outcomes and results, and more creative thinking, much more often. That’s myself included. (…)
I'm a graphic designer with all the formal education, with all the "creative" baggage and struggles that led me to study graphic design - an interest in illustration, street art, the skate culture and underground comics - and found my calling in the web. From the early/mid 90's, I gradually shifted from magazine and print layout, from illustration to html, css and programming. I dived deeper and deeper into what makes the web tick, and after more than twenty years in the front-line of conceptualizing, designing, building, and maintaining web sites I think I have a pretty broad AND deep understanding of the cogs and wheels involved. But. Every time I create something for the web, I have the feeling it is kind of dull. It works, it is lean. It is maintainable, scalable. Most of the web sites I produce live more than five years, some of them are happily humming along after more than 10 years.
And yet, often when I am confronted with ideas by designers who don't have that understanding of the web, there is this element of surprise and playfulness that I am missing in my work.
Maybe true innovation needs that element of ignorance that we so often call out and blame "the designers" for.
It is not that I, or we, always fall back to trusted solutions, no, but still, I have the feeling that while my work provides solid benefit for my clients, it kind of lacks the truly innovative and surprising moment. Interesting question is, and that's kind of what the conference planted, is it really that I'm not "allowed" the creative freedom in the bread-and-butter jobs or is it that I *think* that the truly creative ideas would be wasted anyway on these clients?
Definitely something to think about a litte longer.
Webrocker
5 Reaktionen zu “A reply to Holger”
Design, Trust and Limited Creativity
This type of article is an experiment. Like a blogged mail conversation.
Tom Arnold today declared a thing called Tweetcast - which is kind of a conversation of blogs citing thoughts in other articles and creating a conversation. The conversation is made public on Twitter, so it's a Tweetcast.
Holger Bartel wrote a blog post about the fabulous beyond tellerand I also wrote about , Tom answered, and this is my thought to Holger's answer, which is an answer to Tom's and so on. (Maybe we make fancy visualizations for that one day, but as noted, this is an experiment still).
An interesting thought in Toms article is:
Holger writes:
Which brings together thoughts that I had when I created this little website here. I started with almost nothing. A very simple CMS system (the wonderful Kirby) which does more or less nothing except the things you tell it to do.
The first online version of this website was built in about 2 hours - including writing the basic texts for it. But in a quite different approach than in my daily job as a professional webworker. I did not choose any framework at all for the frontend, didn't use fancy JavaScript frameworks or didn't stick to many design trends which seem so evanescent in these days.
Surprisingly this approach worked out quite well. I still like the way that this little website here does basic things. Fast, accessible, without any bloat. Focussed on the things that matter. I wanted a place to express thoughts. This place here perfectly does that. Nothing more needed. Let's call that approach "basics first design".
It's almost the way I created websites 20 years ago. But with experience and a level of wisdom. The wisdom to know that you could use prebuilt things that can do that. But the conscious decision not to use them. (I took that approach so seriously that this article still lacks a nice looking styling for quotes)
And the thing that brings me back to Holger and Tom is: by not falling back on conventions or frameworks I suddenly felt more creative than ever. I kind of feel like my 14 year old me that sticks together a small little web thing. Except the lousy graphics built in Corel Draw in old dark days.
In contrast to 20 years ago the creative potential comes from a different approach: not the lacking knowledge or lacking means to do things on the web with tech from 2019 – it would be easy to use them - but the limits you set for yourself: focusing on what is required, not using things that are known and convenient - it's heavy thinking, but worth it. Other people's solutions are built for their problems. You have to solve your own. And the deep thinking about your problem is an important part of the creative process.
Set yourself limits. Throw away conventions. Build things. And take back your web. Make it your creative playground.
In a reply to my reply to his initial post, Holger (@foobartel) writes:
The interesting thing here is, (speaking from an economic point-of-view) that this sets the frame in which $clients are biased towards what they expect a website to be. So it gets increasingly harder with each new "same" (everyfuckingwebsite dot com) website that launches, to work outside, to surprise and to sell that. (On a side note, have you read about the Uber and Lyft drivers who played the system by simultaniously logging out of the app; resulting in an increase in demand and a surge in fees? Maybe we webworkers could pull a similar stunt…)
And of course there's a myriad of so-called web-design studios who are making quite a good living out of that; selling the same website over and over again to different clients.
And there is a market for that. And in that market it is exceptional ungrateful to hope for honoration and acknowledgement of truly creative solutions.
Sadly, this market is where we are swimming in.
From the bottom the market is capped by the budgets that are available. Here, truly fresh and innovative things may be possible, but sadly for honour only since there is no money around. From the top the market is capped by the large ad-networks and enterprises; here large budgets are available, but seldom does this trickle down to small studios or single experts - in this market, creative decisions happened way up the ladder and we are hired for our (technical) skillset or because the ad-networks cannot provide enough woman-power on their own and have to sub-contract.
Coming back to the framework/theme "standard", I wonder if this really just is laziness, or if the rather boring "holy grail" look is like the frontpage design of newspapers, where some elements like the masthead have proven to work better under the circumstances (i.e. the display at the news-stand, where only the upper part of the page is visible).
We are constantly challenged by shifting technologies, but in the end the user, their device and their situation is what counts - and for most users, a boring, but easy to understand experience will always trump an "exciting" one where every interface element has to be learned and discovered anew.
May we live in an interesting web.
In a reply to Holgers reply to my reply to his post, Bianca writes
I really like this. The more I think about it, the more I believe that this ultimately is what "expertise" boils down to: In an ever-growing playfield of possibilities and possible solutions and tools, picking the "right" thing. As opposed to using whatever is the "hot" thing right now. Which sooner or later brings us to the current trend of pushing everything over to the client-side and JS, but that's a topic for another TeetCast episode, methinks.
In a reply to Holgers reply to my reply to his post, Bianca (@bkastl) writes
I really like this. The more I think about it, the more I believe that this ultimately is what "expertise" boils down to: In an ever-growing playfield of possibilities and possible solutions and tools, picking the "right" thing. As opposed to using whatever is the "hot" thing right now. Which sooner or later brings us to the current trend of pushing everything over to the client-side and JS, but that's a topic for another TweetCast episode, methinks.
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