Sent to me by someone I used to work with, and it’s actually quite funny …

The web has changed the way we work & play massively. The speed at which new sites, apps, tools and systems are appearing – all with their own goals and feature sets – and how they are now beginning to talk to each other is giving us, as end-users, unending opportunities to be creative. I’m a firm believer that people, from all walks of life, are naturally creative. This is using the term ‘creative’ in its most holistic sense. In my industry, the term ‘creative’ has somehow been altered from representing a mindset or an approach to representing a very specific job title. But I think being ‘creative’ is different to being a ‘designer’. Yes, they’re tightly aligned, they overlap incredibly but they should not be exclusively linked.

I’m constantly in awe of some of the iPhone apps out there. The design elegance, the slickness of interaction, the functionality of the app and the overall user problem they solve … or the opportunity they create. The people who thought them up are as creative as the ones who spec’d, designed and coded the thing.

But if there’s one recent thing that’s reminded me that all people are naturally creative it’s how some people have adapted the new Facebook profile page (see below). The one that allows a more flexible profile photo and then also picks out five other photos to headline at the top of the page. I’m not sure how Facebook envisaged people to use them but the was some users have turned this rather functional profile page into their ‘canvas’ is really, really cool. I tried it but gave up …

Apps like Instagram have brought out the amateur photographer geek in all of us. I reckon Instagram could turn a picture of a half-eaten chicken sandwich into a moody, arty, interesting photo. Services like Twitter encourage us to write, and be creative in what we write, how we write, and where we write. Events planning & organising sites like Eventbrite and Meetup are allowing us to arrange meetups within minutes, fostering collaboration and co-creation. Video sharing sites like Vimeo and YouTube are turning people in their bedrooms into producers or even comedians – people like Rebecca Black, oh hang on, that one wasn’t a joke. Anyway, these tools, readily accessible and easy-to-use, are becoming more available, creating new outlets for previously dormant creative tendencies in all of us. And long may it continue.

One of the reasons I developed my ability to do front-end coding was the arrival of CSS, or for non-techies like me, Cascading Style Sheets … which is a very arty phrase – almost romantic – for something which is essentially a page of code. The ability to change webpage styles and appearance from one source – and not everywhere that specific piece of code appeared in the HTML – was very appealing and saved a lot of time for amateurs like me who couldn’t make up our minds, or who loved that feeling of immense satisfaction that came from changing one line of code in a style sheet document and watching as massive changes appeared on your refreshed webpage. Anyhow, that was then, this is now. The latest versions of CSS (CS 3) allow you to do more and more in the style sheet document from things like customisable dropshadows, box shadows, text shadows, rounded corners, opacity, gradients, the rotation and skewing of images and containers (?), multiple backgrounds, fancy borders, image borders, alternating styles for every ‘n’ items, image replacement, animated transitions (i.e. the horizontal / vertical expanding and contracting of containers), and loads more. Some of those elements I understand more than others, but they’re all taken from this presentation (below) that illustrates the key attributes of CSS3.

See the presentation in its interactive online mode here. Tab the arrow keys to proceed.

Nice video about future concepts for Book applications on tablet devices and the possibilities beyond simply reading a book. Nice find by a work colleague.

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.