to this idea of being "uncreative" or "lacking in artistic creativity": creativity!!! is!! a!! skill!! that you learn via practice and work in the same way you get better at drawing via practice, or you get faster at coding w/ practice. (in my experience) creativity is 95% iterating and 5% actual "creativity". if anything, when you break down creativity, it's just a matter of thinking about the utility of the product you want to create and then figuring out how to execute on that idea. sometimes you come up with an idea you really want to execute on right away, sometimes you start with a blank canvas, add a box, pick a random colour and then force yourself to make do with what you have. 

my biggest suggestion to people who think they're "uncreative" or "not creative" enough is to code/create as much as possible and to consume a lot of different kinds of media!! the more you dedicate serious time and effort into it, the more it'll pay off and you'll realise that "creativity" is just as much of a process as any other form of art!! we all have a creative spark in us, and it's up to us to decide whether or not we want to hone it and how much time we're willing to dedicate to the growth of it!! 

pretty much the entirety of my designs are just me putting a pretty graphic and song lyrics together and bulls***ing the rest. moral of the story is, creativity is for people with hand-eye coordination - the rest of us can somehow get by with hit-or-miss firing tactics. i'll cheer for you.

hahaha, thank you !


and yes, i agree! perhaps i wasn't clear enough or used the wrong wording. 

it's more... hmm. i think for me, it's more that i learn(ed) to code, and i like to code... because i want something specific that isn't already available on resource forums and the like. it's not that i don't consider myself uncreative, but rather, i don't see the point of making codes just for the sake of making codes or exploring hovers/gradients/animations/etc.

i wish i could! because many people make very lovely things, and they seem to have a lot of fun, and it's definitely a form of art, what y'all do. but it's like... i can't code stuff just for fun. and furthermore, i don't really want to in the first place?

hmmm. hopefully that makes sense? basically: creativity is there, but drive and willingness to code just for fun not there, for me, personally... and that's alright tbh! 

That's because coding (or to be more specific, skinning or templating, web design in general) is more like cooking or storytelling. One of the base things you can learn as a storyteller - there is no such thing as a completely 'original' story. It's not a perfect analogy and I apologize if I'm saying something everyone already knows, but I feel the general principle still applies, because you're right, your work will never be totally unlike someone else's, and it's completely exhausting to try to be totally unique. Been there, done that, sucked at it, drove myself into a depressive rut with it, then decided I was done with that and kicked that mindset to the curb because I love making pretty things and I don't care if they kinda look like other people's work because I know I sat at my computer for hours putting this stuff together.

The components never really change, either - if you look at skins, they all have recurring concepts - banners, titles, subtitles, categories, buttons, miniprofiles, user menus - with functions and roles that really don't change from one to the next. Same with posting templates. You can mix and match, dress them up or dress them down, discard some things and add others, but ultimately a cooked chicken is a cooked chicken. Had to get that cooking analogy in somewhere.

So the point I'm trying to make here, in my rambling, wordy manner I apologize for any wayward tangents, is that not being able to create a coded piece of work that is 100% original by the point-blank definition of the word doesn't make you uncreative in that regard, at least not in my eyes. What constitutes stealing with coded work is worthy of an entirely different discussion, but let it suffice to say that I don't think you need to worry about it to the extent that it becomes the reason you don't publish anything. <3

So don't be down on yourself! If you love to code, do it to it, because that sh*t is freaking hard and there's no one who will ever dispute that. Except maybe computer geniuses who were born speaking HTML and CSS as second and third languages.

My confession is that I rely really heavily on my best friend when to comes to coding. She knows all the ins and outs and so whenever I'm stuck which happens a lot... (I'm talking 30 minutes trying to figure it out stuck) I go to her. But I kind of wish I didn't.

I've learned over the years of doing small coding projects, but I find it takes a really long time for things to actually stay in my brain and not become lost. So yes, in short I am sorry, but I am also thankful that you always help me and haven't grown tired of my constant questions.

Once upon a time I broke a whole skin by forgetting a semicolon. My shame to this day.

I keep forgetting to set up indents instead of spaces for my Codepens so I end up cursing at myself when I'm pasting it all onto Jcink and manually deleting all the spaces

sometimes i start w a Nice Dimension (TM) for images like say 500x250 or something and once i'm done with the template its some 472x186 size & i tell myself its needed for my padding: 50px and aesthetically pleasing template shape and just background-sizeit, say its 500x250 still, and call it a day.

and thus, i dont actually know the dimensions of any large image template i ever made lmao

There is nothing worse to me than inconsistent indentation and missing spaces between properties and values.

I got a freelance email coding job this past week (I love coding HTML emails), and before I could do the actual work, I had to stop to correct their template's indents and add spaces to the HTML attributes and CSS prop/values. It was driving me crazy.

They were also missing a few closing tags... like wtf

i've entirely forgotten how to do the actual nitty gritty for profiles and mini-profiles for proboards (as in like installing them properly, not as in coding them)

i feel so much freer with this knowledge completely erased from my brain tbeh i regret nothing-