Creativity & the Internet

I've been involved in design, development, marketing, photography or something creative since as long as I can remember. I grew up with an Etch-a-sketch, played the violin, keyboard and guitar as child (or tried to), spent hours on dreamweaver and photoshop, and made multiple random creations using my Dad's old rusty toolkit and bits of wood I found in our garage.

I remember back in the 90s when web design was all about how amazingly crazy you could make something load, interact or appear on your screen (remember flash!?), the giddiness on screen that was sometimes created, with the internet crying out for more structure and a simpler life!

But then along came the grid systems to bring more structure and framework, all designed to bring greater consistency to web layouts and design. As technology advanced with the rise of smartphones and tablets, the internet had to grow up a little and we stopped designing crazy graphics and created boxes and responsive (responsible?) design.

Riding the waves

A number of years after the boom of hand held devices, and as a creative agency we've seen various waves of change in our industry over this time. At times this has been exciting and innovative, and at others it feels like we're repeating previous issues and trends our industry has faced.

Amidst it all however, what sometimes gets lost is the need to always be creative. People are at heart creative beings, and love being wowed with beautiful things and delightful experiences, both online and offline.

"You can't box creativity"

I've talked a number of times in meetings with clients, with our team and in previous roles in my creative career around allowing creative freedom to grow, finding inspiration from the most random things and harnessing that for use and drive on other creative outlets. The minute we box in our thinking or approach to models like 'this is how it's done' or 'this worked last time' we begin to limit both the creative freedom for exploring the new, and push down opportunity and inspiration for innovation and ideas.

Solve Problems / create something better...

The problem with the digital industry is that too often solutions become the focus. We've had countless clients and projects that start with 'we need this, this, this, and this' with no insight knowledge or process of WHY those things will improve the lives of their customers, audience or bottom line.

We had a project recently that pushed for feature after feature added for launch of the main tool we were building. Despite suggesting we launch and learn, evolve and iterate, the features all got scoped by the client and pushed through to development. It boxes in creativity, insight, user need and most of all - costs a lot of money up front for a client who *might* then need to undo, rebuild, or have users never even utilise those features.

Sometimes problems are hard to define, and the opportunity for design is about improving something. A better user flow, removing barriers, adding in touches of delight, or 'magic moments' as our friend at Basket App, Lex Deak calls them!

Bring everything back to people. To your users, to customers, and to why are you doing this in the first place. You'll get more out of your digital agency, more bang for your buck, and a much longer lasting impact of a product.

Creativity at its heart is about flair, it's about experimenting and having fun. However, design is about solving problems and improving experiences.

The thing is, when we centre your design and creativity around improving something, or solving a problem, you instantly level up. Design for prettiness is just that. Pretty.

Why did Flash die a death?

We live in an insanely impatient world. Everything is at our fingertips on any device imaginable now. When Flash was 'big' sites were crazy, fun, loads of games appeared in the browser. But as devices and design gave users more purpose, more connection and more productivity through digital, Flashy flash websites and games fell over down to screen size changes, the loading of the flv files and ultimately much better web technology.

Remember Badger? Well you can enjoy it again here !

What Flash brought was delight and fun online. But it predominately lacked one thing - user insight, user led design and solving problems. My first website for myself was built in Flash. I still have all the code files and data (no i'm not sharing that) but it was about showing off.

OK, writing this article has taken me a lot longer than planned... I've now gone down a rabbit hole playing old flash games and memory lane websites from the 90s website graveyard! Spacejam!

I'm signing off... but two takeaways:

1. Find Creativity in Everything.
2. Design for purpose.