Creativity at its Finest
Do you remember the simplicity of being a child and the world was only as big as your imagination? With a few simple tools, you could turn pen and paper into a scene of unique characters, left over boxes into a space shuttle, and blankets and furniture into a top secret fort. Once a little older, you realize who you want to become — a scientist, a doctor, an engineer, an artist — and you lean your studies toward the subjects that fascinate you. It’s on this road that I believe creativity begins to minimize if you’re not careful. You may get wrapped up in deadlines, grades, required classes, needing a steady paycheck — whatever the case — and the simple happiness of doing something because you enjoy it, fades.
Tomorrow begins week 5 at The Iron Yard. I’m stoked. Last week we finally put HTML, CSS, and JavaScript together to create a color clock and our own version of a Github profile page using Github’s API. We even threw in a little jQuery to simplify our JavaScript code. As always, our weeks go by lightning fast and it’s always miraculous when we get to Friday and I realize how much more information I now have compared to the week before.
This weekend was incredibly nice because we were able to use our time to get caught up with our work, read up on Backbone.js (the next subject we’ll be covering), and begin our personal website in order to display all of our projects. I woke up early Saturday morning to get started, but realized there was one problem — I had no idea what my site should look like, and later, how to implement my idea.
This dilemma goes back to the concept of creativity, and the ability to summon your childhood self. This is the first project given to us that didn’t have a set of explicit rules, nor an idea of what the final project should look like. The fact that it’s left to us to decide how to represent ourselves rekindled my original excitement for the Iron Yard. I want to become a front end developer in order to make really cool, useful, and creative websites and web applications. This is the first solo project I had in order to show off my talent and skills to the world!
I sat in the corner of a coffee shop in San Antonio with a cappuccino and Google before me to figure out what my personal website should look like. As an adult, you realize what setting is best to produce creative work. In my case for this weekend, it was 1) out of town 2) in a small coffee shop surrounded by the bustle of morning and 3) realizing the only commitment I have right now is to myself and this project. I researched personal sites and scrolled through what other’s had accomplished. I immediately had a catch-22 between creating a very simple site with minimalistic design, or a detailed scrolling site that really pops out to the viewer. I chose the former idea to begin with, and will branch out to the latter as time permits.
I was amazed at how much time I spent thinking about color, typography, and what image(s) to use. You can say I bogged myself down with the little things, when in reality I should do the big things first and come back later to edit the small details. That’s something I thought I broke the habit of, but admittedly I should continue to improve. Regardless, it was an incredible feeling to do something creative, and feel happy because I was enjoying the work before me. My website is still a work in progress, but I plan on improving it whenever I find free time to do so. I’d like to have it done as soon as possible in order to share it and examples of my work.
A spectacular benefit of the moments when creativity is at its finest is the desire to continue to learn. If an idea is overdone, then it’s no longer creative. I know the site I produced can be more unique, and the examples I found online are of things I’d love to figure out how to do myself (but with my own flair, of course!). This allows me to reset my goals, and continue my quest to obtain the knowledge I need to be successful. The Iron Yard provides an incredible resource of people who really know what they are doing, and are willing to help out when needed. I’m confident with child-like creativity and “iron” logic, I’ll get the perfect website up and running in no time.
