Creative or Technical?
July 20th, 2009 (Culture, Tech)I spend a lot of time on the computer. My job requires me to be in front of a computer for 8 hours a day. When I get home, in addition to online bill payments, blogging, catching up on news feeds, Twitter posts and Facebook, I often spend time working on web (or design or programming) projects here and there and watching online content (much more choice than TV). Besides all of the time-wasting stuff (ahem….Facebook), when it comes down to working on a computer, you can really take 2 very different approaches:
- Technical: Programming, development, IT/Network management, etc…
– or - - Creative: Graphic design, web design, video/photo editing, etc…
Technical
I’ve been interested in software and hardware and how they inter-operate for quite a while. I remember scouring the ticalc.org forums every day for new advances in assembly programming on the Texas Instruments graphing calculators. It was so amazing to me that someone had found a hole in every one of the TI graphic calculators to get around the limited Basic programming with its slow interpreter and be able to run machine code straight on the Z80 processor (or Motorolla 68000 in the newer models).
Once I was in college, I learned how a pipeline on a processor worked, how machine code was interpreted, and even how to write a compiler. Pretty cool stuff academically, but you would have to learn a lot more if you were going to go into any specific field relating to one of these topics.
In most work situations, the technical side of computers means software development (and this kind of work varies a lot depending on the language, platform and scale of the projects you work on) or IT kind of things like deploying servers/server clusters, security testing, network design or a support role.
Now, there can be a creative side to the technical as well. When designing a network, server room or even end-user protocols, there are always constraints (time, money, etc…). To get around these constraints and still achieve the desired results, you often have to get creative as an engineer and figure out a way to get the project finished with the given resources.
Creative
While I started out my career in a more technical role, recently I have been focusing more on the creative side of what computers can do. In particular, my focus has been on web design.
When juxtaposed to the black and white world of the technical/engineering, this right-brained creative culture seemed totally out of place to me at first. This was until I had a conversation about originality in creativity. For a long time, I strived to come up with unique designs and found myself falling way short or just having very few ideas that actually worked out. I heard from someone very knowledgeable that there are actually very, very few innovators in any particular field. These are the people that have established themselves as experts over many years of producing works that are recognized by many to be the best (original or not) among their competitors. It’s that whole thing that Pablo Picasso said: “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.” My interpretation of this is to copy work, but make it your own. Sounds kind of counter-intuitive, but it’s all about totally acknowledging that there are many other people in your field who are better than you and who you can learn from and it’s OK to steal the ideas and innovations that they came up with because after all, there are very few people who truly innovate and even fewer who are recognized in their lifetime for the work they have done.
So, just as the technical side of computing must embrace some creativity, so the creative also has a lot of logic to it. There are many rules to follow (which I am still learning as I did not go to art school). Rules like complimentary colors, how to effectively use white space and what fonts to use when. I’ve found that a wonderful resource for learning how some of these rules are used in modern web design is Smashing Magazine. Another logical aspect of design (well, web design in particular) is that all designs eventually have to be turned into code, and if you want to make any changes to that code over time, it should be made to be quite organized and re-usable. Of course, CSS is often not logical because not all browsers interpret it in the same way, but that is another story for another day.
What are you?
What do you prefer? Do you like the technical or the creative side of things better? As you can see there is a lot of overlap and if you learn to embrace them both for what they are, you will not only have learned a new skill, you will have improved the one you already have.
Enjoyed this—you and Leigh kind of cross over into both areas, don’t you? Tho you are more technical and she more creative to begin with, you both make use of the other side of things… Which do you enjoy more? I like the result of the conversation you had about working hard to come up with something original—that coming up with a way to make something your own and thus unique is a more reasonable goal.
You impress me with your knowledge and thought processes…
I vote for the creative!
You’re unusual for a web developer tho in that you have a good eye for design…
I didn’t have to even think about this one. Definitely creative. My knowledge and interest in the hardcore technical realm are both limited.