As a designer i was trained to look past the beauty and aesthetics of any given project but for me to believe that beauty has nothing to with the attention and respect a design gets would require the entire world to be educated to look past beauty as well. For as long as people/businesses believe beauty and aesthetics equal to quality and performance who am i to go against the tide, yet i still do it because i BELIEVE!!!

I was reading couple design magazines the other day, Communication Arts and Print Magazine, each month they select a series of project dubbed as "creative and inspiring" and showcase them in their magazines. I enjoy looking at them and depending on the type of projects i have i may even get inspired by them but i couldn't help notice that from a functional and real creativity point of view almost all of the featured projects where severely flawed. Nothing is perfect in this world and i'm the first to admit that but these magazine are the primal voice in advocating real creativity yet many of the featured projects are based on beauty.

The best type of design is when you don't notice it at all!

Our biggest problem is that we don't really know what the definition of CREATIVITY is, and we can't help but to confuse it with beauty. I follow 15 web design and CSS gallery sites among hundreds of other feeds in my RSSFeed, each day i get a list of some 50 sites that are chosen by the editors of the site based on their beauty, most of them are not functional and if you look a bit deeper into their HTML code you'll also realize that everything is disgustingly put together and there is no more room for flexibility and expansion. What these gallery sites don't realize is that they are influencers and the new designs they publish inspires many other ones. In calculation if 9 out of 10 sites showcased is beauty without creativity and functionality and those 9 inspire another 20 sites to be the same then you do the math, that's right it's no wonder why this Internet is so chaotic, nobody can organize it, nobody can categorize it, nobody can help but to make it even worse than what it is now!

To me beauty is when i look at a site and say "hmmm, that's nice but how do i find the information pages" but a creative site to is when i say "i'm glad i found this useful site, lets bookmark it!"

a creative site can be very beautiful, sometimes the simplest sites that have no graphics or images are more beautiful than the ones packed with color, texture and images. It's how you use design to help people find the right material that ultimately makes you creative. Unfortunately we are creative so that people can notice our designs first, everything else is secondary!

These are the sites that keep advocating beauty for blogs rather creativity:

http://www.problogger.net/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/
http://performancing.com/
http://www.copyblogger.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://cssmania.com/
http://cssremix.com
http://www.webcreme.com/