Several years ago, I could easily churn out 2 to 3 mid-sized websites a week without breaking a sweat. Then I decided I wanted to learn a lot more about design, typography, coding, programming as well as other aspects of design industry.

This led to a quiet year or so where I didn’t really do any commercial or personal work except when trying out the skills I’d learnt.

The past few years, I’ve participated in several small projects and have hundreds of ideas for sites. Most had been personal sites and a few were money-making ventures…

Almost all failed miserably and never even made it onto the web!

I recently found myself asking why, and came up with several possible reasons including one that seemed most feasible…

Knowledge Inhibits Creativity

Looking back, this reason or excuse (call it what you will) seemed to be the real reason that most of my ideas and sites never get any further than the desktop. I’m too critical of my own work and if I don’t like where I’m going with something I presume others won’t too… and thats the end of that.

For example, this weblog has had around 8 designs and only three have made it online!

Now that I’ve decided to spend more time getting back to designing websites I’m hoping this will change, and having spent the past few months getting to know some old best friends (Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks) I find myself slowly getting back into the groove.

As I learnt about accessibility, usability and all the buzzwords of the past few years I tended to spend more time coding textual websites with very little time and effort going into the design… now is the time for change.

Out of curiosity, has the knowledge you’ve gained inhibited your creativity? Do you find that as you’ve developed the number of sites you’ve designed has lessened? Now that you have an idea of what design is really about, are you overly critical of yourself?

Posted on July 8th, 2004 at 5:49 pm and filed under Design.

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