artistic /creative talent" thread.

Who's with me?! I know there have to be plenty of technical minded people that can get the code done, but have absolutely no artistic creativity to build said site on

[Edited on June 2, 2007 at 12:15 PM. Reason : ]

6/2/2007 12:14:35 PM

yeah i'm with you there... i hack together random web pages on my employee webspace at work that are ugly but functional.

hell, i'll go ahead and admit it:

i type up the shit in word or excel and do the save as html thing.

yeah i know, i suck at life.

6/2/2007 12:18:53 PM

ouch, that made me die a little inside

I tried doing that for our invoices and proposals (one of the word templates) and got shot down.

6/2/2007 12:48:34 PM

yep, me too.

I like to think i have a good eye for seeing and identifying good design, but if I start with a blank slate, I get nowhere. That's why I do basically on my "design" (I know real designers would take offense to me using that term) by starting with templates and changing them to fit my needs.
I also hate that I can't Photoshop worth a shit..... i want to be able to make nice graphics and website headers, but 1) i don't have the technical knowledge to do it, and 2) even if I did, I don't have the creativity to think of cool graphics to make.

6/2/2007 12:48:50 PM

^that part of things isn't really too hard.

I think the problem is most people try to design something BEFORE they have the content. Which is almost impossible to do, much less do well.

If you have the content, a market, a target audience, then you can build the design, versus pulling it out of thin air.

I think this is actually worth starting a full thread about web design, maybe just design for non-designers in general.

6/2/2007 1:00:23 PM

Quote :

"jaZon: Who's with me?!"

::raises hand::

although at least my Photoshop skills have marginally improved over time...  

6/2/2007 1:39:11 PM

Quote :

"I think this is actually worth starting a full thread about web design, maybe just design for non-designers in general."

agreed - want to lead it off?

6/2/2007 2:19:17 PM

what about those of us who dont design anymore because we dont have time to learn the new hot shit?

6/2/2007 4:31:49 PM

that too!

6/2/2007 4:36:42 PM

Yup thats me ... And I cant ever find a good designer who has

a) time to contribute to projects that I am working on as hobbies / entrepreneurial ventures (aka free work)

b) good creative skills and knowledge of how to put that in a website form using good practices


Finding one of the two is easy, but finding both together in the same person has proved almost impossible for me.

Or maybe my ideas just suck, but I have to think that Im on the decent/good side of entrepreneurial ideas.

6/2/2007 5:47:25 PM

^it's more a problem that most graphic designers work 40-60 hour jobs, and then work another 10-20 hours a week freelance to supplement a pretty marginal income. All the GD kids I know only make 30-45K and pretty much rely on freelance work at a much higher rate to both stay afloat financially, and to build their own portfolios to be able to form their own firms/go it alone down the road.

The other problem is that that it's actually very rare to find a web designer who has a educational graphic design background. Most web designers have art & design, or engineering/comp sci backgrounds. They don't really teach proper web design at most design schools, many still dont teach any web design.

I've been doing some fundamentals research off and on all day, I'll try to write up a thread tonight to give you guys some direction

6/2/2007 6:08:37 PM

sweet, maybe one of my threads will finally pay off in something worthwhile after 7 years

6/2/2007 7:00:49 PM

Noen - i think the main issue at hand here is not that many of us don't know or can't find out "design fundamentals" and good practices and whatnot. That stuff can be learned, for the most part.

But for so many people, especially engineering types who are technically minded, Type A personalities, we just simply lack the creativity. I mean, show me some websites and I can do a general feeling for which ones are designed well, or show me some graphics and I can pick out good design aspects of them. but give me a blank page and tell me to draw something creative that looks good? Shit.... even if I had the talent to draw something, i have nothing in my mind to draw.

6/2/2007 7:29:25 PM

^ ftw

6/2/2007 7:33:27 PM

That's exactly my point.

No designer starts with a blank page. Artists MIGHT, but designers should always use their research, process, and resources to create the best solution possible.

Having gone through engineering and now design school, I can tell you the amount of "out of thin air" creativity needed isn't very much at all. You can (and many people do) substitute raw creativity for just plain hard work. That's what most design visualization methods are for, to generate ideas where raw creativity breaks down.

6/2/2007 7:36:20 PM

ok, all good points, but still.....
i run into this problem because I manage my wife's website, as a Professional Triathlete. As she gains national and world rank, it's becoming more difficult for me to maintain her website, given my own limited creative talents, up to the standards of other pro athlete websites. In this case, I'm not "starting from scratch". I have a goal and intended audience and all that, but it's still hard.

For example, I made a new header for her site last week - http://alishalion.com/
That's pretty much the limit of my creative talent..... I finally was able to take a decent "action shot" picture of her at a race, which I knew I wanted to use as her header. But I didn't really know what to do with it to make it better. So I just sliced it up, played with the contrast and colors a bit, picked a cheezy font for her name, and that's it.

We're currently doing a re-design of her site to make it more professional looking, and we're using another pro-female triathlete's site for some ideas - http://desireeficker.com/
Now, there are a lot of problems with that site (the white on blue font, the text in the upper left of the header is unreadable, etc), but a lot of the little "artistic" touches like the flowers in the header pictures, not to mention the professionalism, quality and prospectives in the header pictures themselves (except for the color on the first picture), are really nice, i think. But that kind of thing I couldn't really come up with myself without blatenly ripping someone else off.

6/2/2007 7:54:45 PM

I'll back up what Tyler said - I personally think all of my "creative" work is terrible, but put up to the crucible it usually holds its own. I'm not design-minded by any sense of the word, or at least I don't think I am (other people have told me differently, I'm not inclined to believe them though).

I'm a very linear thinker, because that's where my strengths are, but that doesn't mean I don't know what looks good or what is out of my ability range and when I do create things, I do it within my means and try my hardest to make it look damn good.

That being said, I would expect most people to operate the same way I do - they operate on what looks good to them and try to develop that into a viable end product. How they get to that point is often by taking inspiration from things that are attractive to them, and building upon them.

I skinned my personal website a few years ago by taking a bunch of black&white photos and maps + 1 color and slicing them up in a unique but simple way that was pleasing to me, and I got great feedback from everyone that I showed it to.


Of course all of this isn't to say that everyone can be a designer. I am not, by any means, even though I find myself putting in 40+ hours a week doing graphic design work (please not the lack of the qualifier *creative*, because I'm not at that point, and i really don't mind it right now ). Some people have crappy sensibilities, or crappy work ethic so that they don't push what they're able to do to be the absolute best it can be within its bounds.



Long and short :

take what you like, build on it. almost everyone else does it that way. ain't no shame in that game.




^ as far as picture quality... the only way you get em professional looking is by

1. having them professionally done

2. practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice get the point?
practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice practice some more

[Edited on June 2, 2007 at 8:29 PM. Reason : I practice a lot and my pics still look shitty 85% of the time]



more edits:


Honestly, I don't think your wife's current site looks unprofessional at all. I think, especially when compared to the other site you linked, hers looks WAY more professional. I guess it really depends on the effect you're going for, though. The second site obviously reflects the personality of that woman, given the small effects like the flowers, and the blue skin, but in terms of being worried about not being able to match the artisticness of the site without "ripping her off," I think you're making a mountain out of a molehill.

Ask your wife what she likes. "Hey honey, do you like birds? Oh really, what's your favorite kind? What about colors? Rank your top 3 for me. Tell me your favorite kind of animal. What's your favorite event?"

Any one of those answers could contribute elements to the redesign of her site, and you'd be hard pressed to find someone to say that you're ripping anyone off when compared side-to-side. Think of it like a deck of cards with different orderation and suits beyond the normal 4. Take that next step by asking questions.

[Edited on June 2, 2007 at 8:47 PM. Reason : more]

6/2/2007 8:27:38 PM

Quote :

"i type up the shit in word or excel and do the save as html thing."

NOTEPAD is where its at... hardcore to the core!

6/2/2007 9:15:01 PM

I agree with Kiljadn, I like your site better. It's better organized, the value contrast is better, it's MUCH easier to visually navigate (see contrast) and it looks like it has been through several revisions. Everything I see "wrong" with the site are alignment issues, which I should be able to help out with in my forthcoming thread. That and a few typeface modifications would kick it up several notches.

6/2/2007 9:27:52 PM

[Edited on June 2, 2007 at 10:12 PM. Reason : d]

6/2/2007 10:11:56 PM

^^ well, i didn't mean to turn this thread into a clinic on my site, but anyway.... i've been planning on redoing the site anyway for a long time now just because we want a new and fresh feel, and because of my "plan" i've avoided making simple updates that need to be done, like increasing the font size in the navigation bar and updating the side bars for some of the pages.
and yeah, it's been though lots of revisions. Like it used to have subnavigation for almost every page, which is why there is the light-blue bar under the nav-bar (the sub-nav is still on the Gallery page). But the current site have become basically unmaintainable because believe it or not, it's currently hacked together from 2 Wordpress installations, a Gallery2 install, and some static Dreamweaver created pages w/ templates - each of which contain the theme for the site. It's a huge mess on the backend. The main goal of the next redesign, besides a visual refresh, is to completely manage the site design, layout and content all within a single CMS.


[Edited on June 3, 2007 at 12:20 AM. Reason : .]

6/3/2007 12:15:55 AM

Beautiful Thread. I ::heart:: web design. Most of the work I have done lately has been extensive back-end programming so I haven't had a recent opportunity to flex my creative skills. After being a rebel forever, I finally gave in and became a devote follower of the CSS/DIV design philosophy which is definitely a godsend. Death to tables. And that's coming from someone who has design a crop full of websites using tables. Alas those days are over.

My team does "free" work from time to time as long as it's not a monster project that requires lots of programming. As long as its for a good cause and the vendor is willing to provide timely input (content and design review) then we're golden. We never object to having more sites in our portfolio.

Look us up. http://www.interactiveremix.com - Hit me with a good enough proposal and I'll take a peek at my calendar.

6/3/2007 10:54:22 PM

while artistic creativity may make a website look nice, most people are keen at functionality. That's where the design portion really comes in and you need to start thinking of what people are looking for at your website and design around their needs, not yours. If they can't find what they are looking for in 3 clicks, then your website won't have the necessary flow to capture that client as a potential customer or entice them to come back to your website. This is for business though.

You'd also need to know what your target base is and design it around them. If you target to old folks, then having your website setup for a high res monitor and using font 2 isn't the best of ideas.

I can design generic websites that are somewhat functional to what I'd like, but may not be enticing to others. I can create graphics easier than it is to design or have a layout of the website.

[Edited on June 3, 2007 at 11:22 PM. Reason : ]

6/3/2007 11:20:31 PM

i love designing web sites too, but now that my primary job pays more than web design ever would, i've been struggling to keep up with it.

6/4/2007 11:29:27 PM