Constraints, Creativity and Webdesign

6th August 2008 dennis Web [3] Comments Add your own

Blog Headline Image

In many heads, constraints, of any sort, are still viewed as the great enemies of creativity and fantasy. I wish to show that the contrary is the case, that constraints are a vital part of creativity and that they ultimately lead to better design. This concept is not only true in web design, but everywhere where creativity plays a role.

Defining a New Style

Let’s make a little excursion. The time is the so called golden era of Rap: the end of the 1980’s, beginning of the 1990’s. The setting: New York.

In 1987 the company E-mu Systems brought the SP-1200 to the market: a device that was drum-machine and sampler in one. One of the major advantages of the SP-1200 was that one could construct most parts of a song directly on the device. Because of this, studio cost could be reduced dramatically and artist had much more control over their sound because many or even all parts of a song could now be realized without the help of studio engineers. The downside was however that the device came with many constraints: it only had a resolution of 22 KHz and a sampling rate of 12 Bits. Also, it only had memory to store about 10 seconds of samples. Music producers who wanted to use the SP-1200 had to get very creative to overcome these constraints. And they did. To overcome the problem with the 10 seconds sample time, for example, 33 1/3 RPM samples were recorded with 45 RPM and additional with a higher pitch, then they were played with a much slower speed on the SP-1200 thus artificially prolonging total sample time. This and other constraints of the device and, more importantly; how people dealt with them, lead to the famous New Yorker Hip Hop sound of the golden era. The crunchy digitized drums, choppy segmented samples, and murky filtered baselines, which defined a whole new style, were the result of creativity triumphing over constraints.

Artist and Web Designer

How can this effect of constraints, that they challenge to find creative solutions, be leveraged? Let’s look at another example:

Imagine an artist. He wants to create something, he wants to expresses something. What this is, he doesn’t know exactly, he can’t express it in any form yet. He has total freedom in every aspect of his creation: he could create a sculpture, he could write a book, a song, he could paint. Since he has no constraints, except his feeling of what he wants to express, he will need many trials. He will fail, start new and try again. He first has to find out what this feeling is exactly. If he doesn’t set strong constraints for himself, the birth of this work will be painful and take a long time. In the end he might have created the greatest work of art ever, but the process of getting there will have been very rough.

Now imagine this artist as a web designer. He now has a client and deadlines to deal with. If he continues to work the way he did before, the project is doomed to fail. There might be a website in the end, but there will be frustration on both sides—his and the clients.

The Client is not the Enemy

How can a web designer avoid scenarios like this? How can he avoid staring at a blank canvas, trying to find out what to do? He sets constraints for his projects. Having constraints requires him to be creative in dealing with them. He has to come up with a solution which satisfies all of them. The beautiful thing is: he doesn’t even have to set constraints himself; he has a client who can provide them.

Remember: the client is not the enemy. He maybe has no idea about design and the web, yes, but that’s the web designer’s job anyway. He should embrace the client and ask him to give clear defined constraints. This process will help not only the web designer, but also the client: to find out what he really wants and to retrieve requirements for his site he maybe hasn’t thought of. This in turn avoids that too much additional requirements will turn up in a later phase of the project, where costs for implementation are mostly much higher.

Content is King

One of the most important constraints a designer can get from his client is content. Content has to come first. Before he starts, the designer should have talked to his client about what content he wants on his site. This may seem like a trivial fact, but there are still many clients and web designers who look at design as something separated from content. In their heads, the process of creating a website is the following: first we create a design then we just fill in content - done. This can only work by luck. With precise information concerning content, the web designer receives important constraints regarding the layout of the site. He knows what the layout has to be capable of. A simple example: the client wants photographs above the text on every page, except on some special pages. So the layout has to be flexible enough that both variants will look good and don’t break anything.

Project Phases and Constraints

Other examples of constraints for the layout a web designer should inform a client about and agree with him on are constraints concerning screen size (developing for 800*600 or 1024*768 pixels or higher), placement and size of advertisement, should the layout be centered in the browser or left-aligned, etc. These constraints give the web designer clues on how to set up a grid for the site. The grid will then be another constraint, which he can use to further layout the site. With a grid and content information he can create wireframes, which are in turn constraints for the next phase and so on.

This process of designing helps both the client and the web designer. The web designer has a certain amount of steps he has to go through and he can check with the client on all these steps if he is still on track. If the client just gets confronted with a finished design of his site, the chance of him really liking it is purely luck, and chances are very low: if he didn’t give at least some sort of constructive input, he will not feel to have been involved enough, it will not feel as if the site represents him enough. That is also the case, when a client tells a designer to do “whatever he wants”. Clients should be involved as early and as much as possible.

Other constraints which should be considered on every project and should influence design decisions are: usability, accessibility, cross-browser compliance and industry standards

Leveraging Constraints

As we have seen, constraints, in the right form, are creative opportunities. If you are stuck in a design process, check for constraints; they can give support and new orientation and ultimately spark creativity when dealing with these limitations. Dealing with constraints creatively will lead to innovation.

Let me finish by quoting two people, an existential psychologist and a professor of religious studies, working in fields not really related to web design, nevertheless with a similar message:

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
– Rollo May