There are two sides to every coin. So 2 different of viewpoints with your creative products (positive and negative) are always exist. And the question is that how can you use criticism as fuel for your creative process? Creative veteran and current chair for Interactive Digital Arts at UAL, Fred Deakin shares tips on how to take and deal with these creative criticism.
Seek all opinions proactively
The need for positive reinforcement often causes us to lock ourselves away, polishing our ideas till we feel ready to unleash them onto the world. This can, unfortunately, set us up for a shock when someone we respect is not as impressed by the idea as we thought.
By actively seeking outside perspectives early on, we can save ourselves a lot of time and pain later. As much as we might want to impress with our ideas, we should remember to develop our thinking radically and simply
Listen the others to learn from them
It is easy to go on the defensive when we are open to scrutiny and the natural creative reaction is let your mind come up with rebuttals that will keep the concept alive. But doing so distracts your mind from listening. There is little use in asking for input if you are not going to take it.
Next time, instead of preparing yourself for a debate, listen to what is being said without thinking about what it means for you or your idea, there is time to think about that later.
Don't make it be personal.
Just because someone does not like your idea, it does not mean that you are a failure. Historically, many successful innovators came up with “wrong” or “bad” ideas before hitting the right one. The trick is not to get too bogged down by the negative feedback and to use it as a motivation to push yourself and your ideas further.
Head over here to continue reading on about how to take creative criticism.
Todays, there are thousands of websites built each day. However, they all look similar. It seems websites are being lost their soul. Fortunately, we can solve it by the responsive web design to create virtual experiences that adapt to different devices. There are other problems out there that we’re called on to solve, though, not least of which is to make content of all kinds appear interesting and engaging. But the question is can we succeed at solving both of these problems?
What We’ve Gained
There’s no doubt about it, the web has become an aesthetically beautiful place. Simple, attractive sites that are built on solid grid layouts have become the standard. The wild west of the web has been tamed. Law and order in the form of frameworks and fluid grids have taken over and peace reigns throughout the land.
All of this is a good thing. The benefits of simple, attractive sites are both clear and plentiful:
Familiar and easy for users to navigate (when done correctly).
Prototyping is (relatively) fast and easy.
Heavy standardization of site-building techniques (assembly lines have replaced artisans).
Fast layout leads to big cost savings (which may or may not be passed down to the customer).
Strict grid layouts lend themselves to responsive design (the minimal layout trend is driven heavily by this need).
A stroll through a web design gallery like Awwwards reveals hundreds of fantastic sites that fit the criteria of simple and attractive sites. (View large version)
It can’t be overstated that there is immense value in standardization and associated techniques. Countless individuals and small businesses benefit from having simple, attractive (and not at all unique) sites to share their brand with the world. However, that’s just one side of the story.
What We’ve Lost
Taken in individual doses, the average professional website today looks great. Compare even a lowly designer’s portfolio site today to the best design agency sites ten years ago, and you’ll have to concede that we’ve gotten a lot better at this web design thing. However, as you look around, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that everything is starting to look the same.
Have designers lost that pioneer spirit? Has creativity been sacrificed on the altar of convenience? Before answering these questions, let’s take a look at what’s causing the lack of variation in web design today.
Reasons Why Sites All Look The Same
What’s the driving force behind the feeling of sameness that we get as we look around the web today? What’s to blame? As it turns out, it’s not as simple as pinning it all on one tool or method. RWD might contribute, but it’s just one item in a long list. Here are a few of the likely suspects.
LAYOUT
Limited layout ideas are one of the most prominent and obvious reasons for a lack of variation on the web. Strip out colors, animations, parallax scrollingeffects and the like, and you start to see that a few basic layouts rule the web. How many sites can you name that use only slight variations of these five layouts?
This is what Noah meant when he lamented that all he saw were “boxes and grids everywhere.” We seem to have reached a stagnation point where unique layouts are a lost art.
RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN
Once upon a time, you could guarantee that everyone visiting your website would be doing so on a low-resolution desktop computer screen. These days, websites that look great on almost any viewport at any resolution aren’t a luxury, they’re a necessity. Basic, fluid-width, collapsing grids make responsive web design a much simpler process than more organic layouts.
FRAMEWORKS
Web design frameworks have the potential to rapidly speed up both design and development workflows. For many, they’re the safest, most straightforward route to a responsive, cross-browser website. As a bonus, they also take care of simple styling for all manner of common elements, from buttons to forms. The incredible popularity of tools like Bootstrap and Foundation leads to thousands of web designers using the exact same codebase, layouts, and even aesthetic style on every project they take on.
PROTOTYPING TOOLS AND PROCESSES
Even our blank-canvas design process has intentionally reduced creativity from the design process. Most prototyping tools encourage and perhaps even force you to use standardized, boxy elements that conform to strict grid layouts.
Many prototyping tools encourage common grid layout structures. (View large version)
HIGH-QUALITY FREE PHOTOS AND GRAPHICS
Never before have beautiful, free design assets been so readily available. Again, convenience and affordability reign supreme, so we see designers flocking to free photo sites, pulling from the same small (but growing) pool of resources.
In the last two years, how many sites have you seen using one (or both) of the two photos above? If you browse the web regularly, I’d wager the number is in the dozens.
This goes way beyond photos, extending to icons, fonts, patterns, and so on. The upside here is that designers with zero budget can still make great looking sites; the downside is that every other designer is doing the same thing with the same resources.
DESIGN TRENDS
To some designers, “trend” is a dirty word. It shouldn’t be though. Pick a decade in the 20th century and examine its design trends. What you find is fascinating. It gives that time period its own distinct style and personality, and is often a reflection of the entire culture. Even if you can’t see it, it’s happening right now in your work. Everything you see and experience is affecting what you do, and the web amplifies this like never before. The result is a lot of designers gaining inspiration from the same sources and pursuing the same trends.
YOU AND ME
Every tool and resource listed above is incredibly valuable. These things make our jobs easier, open up web design and development to more people, and save clients money. I didn’t choose them arbitrarily, I use them. If we’re looking for someone to blame for a lack of variation in web design, I’ll raise my hand. It’s me. And while I don’t think every project merits a unique design, I’d like to tip my hat to the designers out there who are trying to do something more interesting.
It’s also important to note that you can use any or all of the above and still create a unique design. It’s all in how you wield the tools that are available to you.
How To Challenge The Status Quo
At this point, you’ve already decided whether or not you care if your site designs are unique. Maybe that’s not your thing — that’s completely acceptable. If you find yourself wanting to break out of your typical workflow, though, here are a few ideas to get you going and some sites that serve as great examples.
GET WEIRD WITH LAYOUT
Close your prototyping app, take out a pen and some paper, and think about how you can make an interesting, usable layout that’s not something you’ve ever done before.
Phases Magazine
Phases Magazine is a good example of a site doing something unexpected with layout. It’s boxy — there is a grid at play here — and yet somehow they made it feel totally outside the typical web design experience (the screenshot doesn’t really give you a good feel for it; be sure to visit the site). If you see this and think, “Whoa, that’s weird,” good! That’s what they’re going for. Some will love it, some will hate it, but I really like that they’re trying something different.
Unfortunately, the site’s overall experience is quite poor. There’s some unnecessary scrolljacking, and the seemingly responsive layout breaks massively in certain viewports.
hases Magazine’s layout breaks on smaller screens. (View large version)
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Curious Space
A better implementation of a similar idea is Curious Space.
Here the grid still has a more organic feel, but scrolling functionality is normal and the breakpoints are perfectly functional.
Curious Space adapts well to different devices. (View large version)
There are a lot of nice little design touches that you notice as you interact with the site. For instance, the image stack order changes on hover:
Hovering with a mouse brings content to the foreground. (View large version)
Also, they have a bit of fun with scrolling, but it’s not disrupting in the least, and it fits with the haphazard visual theme of the site. The logo starts off as a jumble of letters, but as you scroll, they fall into place and form “Curious Space” in the navigation bar.
The letters of the logo fall into place as you scroll. (View large version)
Le Temps D’un Trajet
Another interesting example is Le Temps d’un trajet. Once again, we see a non-standard grid, but instead of being sporadic, the layout is more intentional and clustered.
Each block in the arrangement is a static image that turns into a short video on hover. The coolest part, though, is how the grid shifts fluidly to accommodate focusing on different nodes.
https://vimeo.com/132422950
DON’T BE A SQUARE
One easy way to give your site a different atmosphere is to think outside the box. As cringeworthy as that sounds, when you open yourself up to different geometry, things can get really interesting.
Check out the hexagon hive that Built By Buffalo has going on. This gallery design doesn’t translate nicely to mobile, so they simply switch to rectangles at one of their breakpoints. This is a great example of doing something unique where appropriate, but realizing where the boundary should be drawn to give your users the best possible experience.
The layout switches to rectangles on narrower viewports. (View large version)
Anakin Design Studio
One of my favorite sites in this vein that I’ve seen recently is Anakin Design Studio. Not only is the layout beautiful and unpredictable, the shapes at play here are all far outside what you’d expect scrolling through today’s websites.
Anakin Design Studio‘s homepage. (View large version)
As you can see, the huge, masked typography makes a bold impression. Beyond that though, if you move down the page you see a display of recent work. Most designers would put a simple rectangular thumbnail grid here and call it a day, but Anakin has played with the shapes to make it a lot more interesting. They’re still rectangular images, but they’ve used white backgrounds to create the illusion of varying shapes.
The layouts above only seem complex because of the artwork; in reality, they can be pulled off fairly easily. Custom illustration work is a fantastic way to communicate a unique brand personality in a world lost in minimal thumbnail grids that all look the same.
For Better Coffee uses entertaining animations to track the coffee bean through the coffee creation process as you scroll. The experience is smooth, and it doesn’t jump the page to predefined points, so scrolling becomes a story-telling feature.
A coffee bean falls toward a grinder as the page is scrolled. (View large version)
Further down the page, scrolling pours fresh coffee into a cup. (View large version)
HappyFunCorp
While we’re on the topic of beautifully illustrated sites, you should check outHappyFunCorp.
At first, it seems like a fairly normal site with some fun little animations. The cool part happens when you start to navigate. The scene on the homepage serves as the basis for the rest of the site, so when you follow a link, instead of loading a brand-new page it zooms in to a detail of the whole scene.
Following a link zooms in to a detail. (View large version)
It’s quirky, but I love the original thinking that went into it. Also, because the navigation is still presented in a standard way means that there’s no learning curve for users. The whole experience in delightfully unexpected, but in a way that doesn’t contradict how you normally interact with a site.
VARY THE EXPERIENCE
One basic expectation that users have is that everyone who lands on the same site will receive the same experience; a fun way to do something different is to toss that out the window. Vasilis van Gemert’s site not only uses a unique, overlapping box layout, it also changes its entire color scheme for every visit.
This creative feature extends beyond the homepage to all of the major subpages.
Subpages also change their color schemes. (View large version)
CREATE A UNIQUE VISUAL THEME
Another way to make your site design unique is to decide on an entertaining or interesting theme that you can use as the basis of all your design decisions. This provides a nice framework for everything you do and encourages you to explore beyond traditional UI.
While not appropriate for all sites (a government website, for instance), for things like event announcements or small company pages it can be refreshing. The new site for dConstruct 2015 is a great example of this idea.
As you can see, they went for a retro-futuristic vibe, heavily reminiscent of The Jetsons. The result is a site that’s flat out fun to scroll through as you discover the how they present each new section.
A detail from the dConstruct design. (View large version)
There are a couple of really great things to note about this site. First of all, the headline treatments are wonderfully retro, using a combination of Lamplighter Script and Andes.
The best part, though, is that these are live web fonts with the diagonal direction implemented via a simple CSS skew. The repetition of diagonal lines throughout the site helps the design feel both consistent and creative.
With creative use of styled web fonts, all the text is selectable. (View large version)
This site is a great example of how responsive design doesn’t have to be boring. The layout doesn’t feel boxy or typical, and yet it manages to reflow nicely to any viewport size. In fact, I really love how creative they were with transforming elements for smaller screens. For instance, as your viewport shrinks, the ticket graphic shown below jumps into an animated transform that shifts from horizontal to vertical orientation. It’s a tiny detail, but it’s clever and shows how much thought was put into every aspect of the layout.
For narrow viewports, the ticket flips from horizontal to vertical. (View large version)
Hats off to Clearleft for the great work on this one.
USE STOCK AS AN INPUT, NOT AN END RESULT
I work at Creative Market, so I’m absolutely in favor of using great stock graphics, fonts, photos, and more. Quality stock resources can be immensely helpful for every designer, but how you use them is an important consideration. Whether you’re using some interesting vector artwork, an icon set, or a full-blown website theme, consider putting in some extra effort so that your implementation doesn’t look exactly like that of everyone else. The vast majority of people downloading that asset won’t bother with much or any customization, so a little bit goes a long way.
The Trouble With Unique Sites
Finding sites that are truly surprising and unique is a tall order. I put in hours of site searching to prepare for this article and still feel like I have very little to show for it. One overwhelming trend I’ve found is that it often feels like the only designers really pursuing unique web design are producing sites with wonky user experiences.
Experimentation is great, but sites that confuse users with weird, unexpected and unpleasant UX often fall short of their goals. Many of these sites take a step backwards by presenting us with Flash-like experiences: long loading times, overly ornate animations, jumpy scrolling, and complex user flows. There is a middle ground. You can create beautiful, unique looking websites without trying to reinvent the interaction wheel.
Web Design Lives
Standardization and predictable design will always have their place on the web. In fact, they may be the best possible solution for presenting most types of content to most screens. That said, we should let our creative instincts fight it out with our analytical instincts from time to time.
There are so many designers put there making sure the web remains what it has always been: a place for technology, art and design to overlap in new and interesting ways. Be a pioneer, try something you’ve never seen anyone do — and yes, make lots of mistakes along the way. You know "failure is mother of success". It’s great to create something weird every now and then, even if other people hate it. That’s how this crazy thing called the web was built, and that’s how we’ll keep pushing it forward.
Ultimately, although there are plenty of sites look pretty similar, I don’t believe that web design has reached a point of stagnation. There are countless extremely talented designers creating unbelievable sites, constantly raising the bar for their peers. This topic is wide open for debate, though. I’d love to hear your thoughts about the state of design on the web, and who you think is doing the most interesting work.
After analyzing art history and classifying the work in the art history books and the museum exhibitions, it gives the perfect result. Naturally, Monet decorated the world with more mottled paintings which can impress anyone look at it, Picasso changed his style to cubism. Look at this, we can see that Artists have evolved. However, at that time, Monet and Picasso may considered carefully and hesitate to change or not.
It’s really a hard inside struggles because we have to change ourself, our “brand”, our style… So Picasso and Monet have to wrestle with this reality to keep the new style is still fresh, enthusiastic, and authentic
This takes courage.
Because your personal brand is a place that you know what to expect and what people expect of you. So it’s hard to escape from that comfortable and safe house. However, you are one of living creatures, so you have to grow to not be left behind. Don’t blind your self with “the old fashion garb”, try the new things, you can avoid the emptiness and feel truly alive to yourself and your work.
I went through this process of creative evolution this past year, though more in an entrepreneurial capacity. Previously, as a time management coach, I focused exclusively on universally accepted concepts around lasting behavioral change with time management. I’ve enjoyed the diversity of clients this has attracted and still plan on offering this approach to anyone who might need my services.
But this past fall, I announced a new faith-based offering called “Divine Time Management.” I realized that by hiding from my audience the huge role that faith played in my life, I was being inauthentic and withholding valuable information that could lead to new levels of breakthrough for people who were open to it.
I’ve owned a business for over 10 years and had never done anything overtly Christian so I was nervous about how people would respond.
Would my current clients leave? Would people put a lot of judgments on me that were based on their past experience and not who I actually was?
Despite these concerns, I stayed true to myself and mustered the courage to move forward. Did some people leave my list? Yep. Were a few people not happy with the evolution? For sure. If I had done this by survey and public opinion, would I have proceeded? Probably not. But was I being true to myself and allowing myself to grow in my work? Absolutely.
To my pleasant surprise, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, even from people who didn’t share my faith background. They appreciated that I was being authentic to myself and in turn giving others the inspiration to do the same. Both myself and my business have flourished as a result.
The road was long and bumpy, but here’s what I learned:
Be honest with yourself first
Like Gretchen Rubin says in Better Than Before, be particularly aware of anything that you feel you need to hide or explain. It’s a good sign you’re living out of alignment with your values. Also pay attention to instances where your body is there but you mentally disengage because you could almost do what you’re doing in your sleep. Admitting to yourself that you need to infuse new life or maybe completely change your brand or your work is an important first step.
Share selectively with trusted individuals
Some people may flip out and don’t want you to change because it’s inconvenient for them in some way. So it’s OK to start sharing with a small circle of supporters. This will probably look like conversations with mentors or close friends. (Be very careful about how much you share with colleagues if you’re not thoroughly committed to a shift.) Give yourself the freedom to brainstorm and to not commit to any particular new direction immediately. There’s often a door you could open if you just stopped to consider that there could be a way out, or at least a shift.
Lean into the risk
Once you decide on a direction, you don’t need to cannonball into the new way of working or kind of work. You can start with a special project or class or even a hobby. You don’t need to even show anyone your new work at first. When you’re in the incubating stage, it’s important that your new creative outputs have a safe space to be birthed and to develop. Keep doing the things that are already working for you to provide a firm foundation until you figure out what sticks. There’s no need to immediately quit your job or publicly rebrand your business.
Tell your story
When you do decide to go public with your new ideas, explain your story in an authentic human way. For example, Natalie Sisson, known for years as “The Suitcase Entrepreneur,” unpacked her suitcase and rebranded as someone who helps people create businesses that aren’t necessarily about traveling all over. Instead of just saying that she was going in this new direction, Natalie shared the story of how changes with her father’s health had lead to a personal re-evaluation of her priorities. Yes, this was a shift from her digital nomad lifestyle but by telling her story she could illustrate that it was ultimately about freedom to have a business that allowed you to have a life you loved.
Care less about what people think.
There’s a time and place for surveys and customer feedback. But when it comes to re-inventing yourself, an outside in approach is dangerous and can leave you feeling like more of an imposter than before. There is far less creativity than there could be because people are so concerned about measuring and monitoring public opinion that they keep themselves within a narrow band of what they feel is politically correct, socially acceptable, and what people expect from them.
You are not a new brand of deodorant. Stop acting like you should always dictate what you do like a market survey for a mass consumer product.
In short: You must now that You are more than your “brand”. As a living, breathing, developing human being, you don’t need to be ashamed to change. It’s vulnerable to break yourself you’re well known for a long time. But it’s also incredibly freeing and an opportunity to truly come alive. Now is the time to be who you are now instead of carrying around the shell of who you once were.
Over to You…
Have you been type casting yourself?
What ways have you seen yourself or others break out of your/their own personal mold?
You know that Amazon is the biggest market for authors to sell ebooks/books. Now, it has a new awesome feature by reading your Kindle books to you. And it’s totally free for this service.
Alexa calls this service as Kindle Books, it uses the robotic voice of Alexa to read any Kindle ebook in your library. This service is similar to “text-to-speech” technology which is used for Wikipedia articles – according to an Amazon update note.
This means that you will not read the same kind of book on Audible (because Audible is the paid service), however, this service will be more popular in non-Audible users.
When you want to use Alexa reading, you just need to utter one of these phases: Alexa, read “[Kindle book title],” or “Alexa, read my Kindle book.”
If you want to stop reading and do something else, you just need to tell Alexa “Pause”. And when you are ready to continue to read the book, you can say that “resume my book”. It’s also possible to tell Alexa to go “forward” or “back” while you are reading any book.
This amazing service was leaked by AFTVnews in the recent Amazon newsletter and surfaced last week.
The Hololens – Microsoft’s augmented reality headset – has attracted so much people who are curious and want to try this modern device. However, information about how it work is nearly zero.
Fortunately, in the recent event held at Tel Aviv, Israel, a little bit information about Hololens has been leaked.
With the amazing battery, this device can work within 5 to 5.5 hours on email or Word documents, and 2.5 hours if you want it to work with highly intensive computation which involves detailed renderings. Harris revealed this in a Youtube video posted by Israel-based wearables entrepreneur Niv Calederon.
This video has been eliminated, however, Harris confirmed that HoloLens will never be warm and heat dissipated is its great feature. And this device can work well without a wired connection
Harris also said that HoloLens has ability to connect with anything including wifi, bluetooth. It also can use 3D audio. However, the first version only support English.
He also addressed questions regarding the HoloLens’ field of view (FOV), saying that the experience is like having a 15-inch monitor about “this far” from your face, at which point he holds his hands about a foot in front of his face.
Back in December, Microsoft made the HoloLens available for the public to test at its Fifth Avenue flagship store in Manhattan. But the price is $3,000 per one, the device is really more for developers rather than the general consumer market.
The HoloLens is planned to start shipping to developers in the first quarter of 2016.
