Balancing Creativity & Functionality in Web Design

lking
November 19, 2023

Description: This blog talks about how you can show your creativity through your web designs while still making them functional.

Introduction

In the entire Web field, functionality is a priority. A website’s goal is often related to attracting, retaining, and serving a purpose. As a result, functionality is expected on websites, since they’re all about the user. In order to meet these goals, you have to make it usable and useful to your audience. Web designers achieve this by using various techniques to follow things such as the ADA guidelines.

Creativity is important as well, since it is one of the main ways to attract your initial or intended audience. By combining these two, a designer/developer can create a website that users love. It’s not that simple though, combining these can be difficult. Sometimes you have to make creative sacrifices in order to prioritize functionality. Finding a balance between these two is important to create a fully functional website.

Choosing between Creativity or Functionality

Many websites follow other functionality practices in order to make the site user friendly to all, but sometimes it can take away from the things that they wanted to add. For example, you may have wanted a color scheme with low contrast for a specific design, but had to change it because it wouldn’t be fair to those who are color blind. In these cases, you have to figure out which is more important when relating it to a users experience. Yeah, the creativity would be cool, but how much would that actually help an user?

Steps to balance creativity and functionality

I did some research to find out the industry standards when it comes to balancing creativity and functionality. So, here are five ways to balance them and create a successful website. I used a Linkedin article to to help gather information for these.

Identify the purpose of your website

In the beginning of this blog, I mentioned the common goals of many websites. They are related to the purpose. The purpose of your website determines what goals you want to achieve. If your a business, you goal is most likely attracting and retaining customers while converting sales. If your a nonprofit organization, your goal may just be attracting traffic to your website to spread awareness and advertise your business. With sites like these, functionality is prioritized over creativity, because their goals are more related to the users visiting and returning to their site. On the other hand, if the purpose of your site is to show your creativity and art, functionality may not be a priority. Yes, you’ll probably still want traffic, but it isn’t the purpose of your website. So, figuring out your site’s purpose helps you figure out what you need to prioritize.

Identify your site’s audience

This goes hand in hand with identifying the purpose of your website. By identifying the purpose, you can figure out the type of people you want to attract. Depending on who they are, you can figure out what needs to be prioritized.

Utilize Web Design Principles

There are many different web design principles out there to help you enhance your site and make it useful to everyone. Some examples include: using readable fonts, having proper alignment, using white space, etc. One book I remember reading in class was called “Don’t Make Me Think”, and this is like a design principle as well. You don’t want to force your users to think when nursing your site, unless that is the intent. So, make your site as easy to use as you can! To learn about a technique to make your web design sites balanced, check out this blog post!

Creative elements don’t have to be dramatic

When being creative, you don’t have to create one large piece to stand out. Throughout a site, you can add many small creative elements that can add to the site just as much as a single large piece could. This way the elements are spread out and since they’re smaller it’s less likely that they’ll negatively affect those with disabilities. An example of this could be little animations and interactive elements. If those animations affect certain people, this could be solved with an accessibility plugin. I talk more about these in the next paragraph.

Add an accessibility plugin

An accessibility plugin makes your job easier by making your website customizable. It comes with options such as resizing text, inverting colors, pausing animations, and changing the contrast. By giving people these options, you can be more creative because you know that it’s not permanent for every viewer. Therefore, it shouldn’t affect every viewer. I’m currently working on a site for Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA), which is a club. In this site, my partners and I are utilizing an accessibility plugin as an extra measure to make sure our site is ADA compliant. If you want to check it out, click here!

image representing how prioritizing relates to web design — Prioritize Vectors by Vecteezy

Conclusion

In conclusion, the balance between creativity and functionality in your site depends on your purpose and goals. This then leads to figuring out what you need to prioritize. Most sites are created to gain traffic, therefore satisfying the user is the main priority. Functionality is what’ll keep most users rather than creativity. If a site doesn’t do its job, users most likely aren’t going to stay on it or come back to it no matter how nice it looks. Besides that, in web design, every web designer should make their sites accessible to those with disabilities anyways. It is a standard within the web design industry.