Abstract
The paper explores how a person involved in web design could exercise their creativity in a way that would help achieve project goals and solve problems related to the design. It briefly goes through the main stages of creating a website and then goes on to suggest that the challenges and issues web designers are presented with as they work on a project should be viewed as inspiration for creative work. The thesis of the paper is that although creativity by itself is an invaluable skill it should be applied with caution to the topic of web design because all the creative decisions should be based on specific needs of the project and it is the needs and their creative fulfillment that form the end product and not the other way around.
Web design encompasses a wide selection of jobs and functions needed to produce a properly built and fully functioning website. One can roughly define two major stages in website creation, namely, the one concerning the visuals and another that is all about the layout and is, in general, more technical, however, not in any case less creative. These two stages can be broken down to substeps: generating ideas, coming up with the visual representation of the website, picking a framework and a suitable CMS, deciding what elements of the webpage should be interactive ("30 Great Interactive Sites", 2013), etc. Each of these steps offers a huge plane to experiment on, especially, if the purpose and function of the future website in question are not quite defined yet and, therefore, the requirements web designers are presented with are much less rigid and strict than they would be, for example, in case of a detailed guideline for, say, campus webpage. Not to say that one cannot get creative with a campus webpage, but in this case it would be a different kind of creativity that does not completely originate from a designer’s imagination, but instead springs out of the functional and layout needs presented in a specification.
When it comes to creating a new website usually at least two persons are involved, each responsible for one of the two major stages mentioned in the previous paragraph. One can reasonably argue that a single person can do both tasks successfully and the end result would be as much creative and professional as in case with a team of ten people. It is ultimately true, however, taking into consideration time constraints designers and developers often face, such practice is likely to prove itself to be quite ineffective. But there is also a bright side to this since being restricted in time often yields much more creative and interesting results because it encourages critical and rational thinking: questionable and not-so-good-but-could-work ideas get killed right away giving space for more elegant and quick decisions. However, all of the above holds true only if the team is truly motivated to deliver the best result they can achieve.
A burden of solving problems presented in a specification lies equally on the shoulders of designers and developers. It is quite beneficial for them to cooperate at the stage of figuring out how to make everything work because the developers using their technical knowledge could instantly provide designers with feedback on what parts of their design would need adjustments in order to translate well into layout. A good visual web designer always has some knowledge of the technical stuff, the same is true (in reverse) for a developer, so being a professional web designer is somehow like being a multi instrumentalist. For example, presented with a problem of translating an important piece of information from a block that is available at the desktop website to its mobile version where the said block was specified not to be displayed, one could choose from the variety of different paths. The most simple, the less time-consuming and, probably, the most boring way is to just display the block on the mobile version as well. However, this is not what a good web designer would do. Apart from the important information there could be lots of redundant things for mobile in that block. One has to ask themselves, why was it specified that the block should be removed from the mobile version in the first place? Having understood the reasons, the designer can get creative and solve the problem in a way neither they, nor anyone else could have imagined.
Presented with such tremendous possibilities for creativity a web designer has to remember that in the end of the day the only thing that matters is a fully functioning website that is fast, easy and pleasant to use and which also follows the web guidelines ("W3C QA - How to achieve Web standards and quality on your Web site?", 2016), so, while it is vitally important to apply creativity as much as possible, it has to be focused on the specific problems and needs the design and layout are trying to solve and address. Creativity for the sake of creativity is not something a good web designer would allow themselves to do while working on a project.
References:
30 Great Interactive Sites. (2013). Webdesignerwall.com. Retrieved 20 March 2016, from http://webdesignerwall.com/trends/30-great-interactive-sites
W3C QA - How to achieve Web standards and quality on your Web site?. (2016). W3.org. Retrieved 20 March 2016, from https://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/Web-Quality
