Creative exhaust, the power of being open by default: Brad Frost at TEDxGrandviewAve - YouTube by Brad Frost
Brad Frost is a web designer, speaker, writer, musician, and artist located in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA. He spends most days (and nights) creating Web experiences that look and function beautifully on the never-ending stream of connected devices. He travels all over the world speaking about Web design, and has worked with brands Nike, Tiffany, AOL, Entertainment Weekly, HP, MasterCard, L’Oreal and more. When not seated in front of a computer, he’s behind a bass guitar or drum kit playing music with his lovely wife.
For most of human history, creative acts where mostly solitary process. Or teams of people working on expensive equipment, making the barrier to entry very high.
Because creating was expensive, the focus was on the output, final product.
The Internet has changed who can create and what. The web is uniquious, meant for everyone. It’s decentralized and roalty-free: you don’t need to ask permission to create nor to link to other sites. open web
Collaborative tools are like magic compared to the past times. Multiple authors working on the same Google documentation or codebase at the same time is fascinating.
Platforms like GitHub or Tumblr make it easier than ever to share and collaborate on works of art.
Back when Chris Coyier was running CSS-Tricks, its license, called SUPER IMPORTANT LEGAL DOCUMENT said:
I don’t give two hoots what you do with any of the design or code you find here.
Actually, I do. I hope you take it and use it, uncredited, on a super commercial website and get wicked rich off it. I hope you use it at work and your boss is impressed and you get a big promotion. I hope it helps you design a website and that website impresses somebody you think is super hot and you get married and have smart, chill babies. I hope you use the code in a blog post you write elsewhere and that website gets way more popular and awesome than this one.
If you feel like telling me about it, cool. If not, no big deal. If you feel better crediting it, that’s cool. If not, don’t sweat it.
If you copy an entire article from this site and republish it on your own site like you wrote it, that’s a little uncool. I won’t be mad at you for stealing, I just think you’re better than that and want to see you do better. I’m not going to come after you though. I’d rather play ball with my dog. The only time I’ll be mad at you is if you go out of your way to try and hurt me somehow. And again I probably won’t even be mad, just sad. Unless I’m having a bad day too, in which case I apologize in advance for my snarky replies.
I want the web to get better and being all Johnny Protective over everything doesn’t get us there. I understand other people feel differently about this and might have semi-legit reasons for protecting certain code, design, writing, or whatever. I work on some closed-source projects myself. CSS-Tricks isn’t one of them. Go nuts.
which is hilarious and lovely.
Editor
In 2024, it reads:
CSS-Tricks content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial – ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Web designers rely on collaboration and that’s why they often default to open. They do this without any expectation of financial reward or fame or fortune.
Brad talked with someone who worked in a giant hospital doing cancer research. They bumped up the font size of the donation form, resulting in 20% increase in donations. When asked if they shared this insight, they said “I’d like to but we’re not allowed because it would cause us to lose our competitive advantage”.
Competitive advantage vs curing cancer - what a tradeoff.
Brad shared his work with a local food bank redesigning their website and how they shared everything: tweets, contracts, drafts, code, everything.
Why do this?
Sharing with community can provide valuable feedback and insights. Other people can fix your stuff.
In a lot of cases, it’s actually easier for me to try to solve everyone’s problem rather than just my own.
What happens is people with similar problems gravitate together to collaborate and solve the problem together.
Data exhaust has become a trend. Similarly, creative exhaust is the by-product of creative creation and it can have immense value and be more powerful than the original work.
Brad’s work with the food bank had been used as mandatory reading for web design students.
Conclusion
It’s not about what you do: it’s what you enable other people to do
Which is better: increasing your donations by 20% or enabling every non-profit to increase their donations by 20%?