Let's Get Creative

My latest side-project is finally ready to go live. Introducing…

Let’s Get Creative is a collection of high-quality, free, online, creativity tools. The website is intended to be a safe, bookmarkable, creativity resource for kids and adults.

A little background

When the pandemic hit, we found ourselves with three bored school-aged kids at home. We were desperate to find productive-ish things they could do on their school Chromebooks without a lot of supervision. I started collecting links to creativity tools and I published a list on this blog back in March 2020.

The kids went back to school of course but I couldn’t stop thinking about creativity tools. I wrote about them a lot and I kept collecting links whenever I came across them (often sharing them in my links posts).

I’m not sure why I like them so much. I think they just live at the intersection of a lot of my interests. They use cool front-end web technologies. They encourage exploration and experimentation. They give you superpowers and an opportunity to exercise your agency. In a world of streaming services and bed-rotting, I’ve developed a strong belief that the future belongs to creators:

Anyways, throughout this process I’ve become something of a creativity tools snob. The ones on Lets Get Creative are among the best, so I thought that building a nice site to feature them would be a valuable contribution to the internet.

In which I got carried away building the site

The idea for this site started out simple but quickly became much more ambitious. Sure, a single HTML file would work but I felt like the projects deserved a proper showcase, with a design that truly captured their creative essence. I started to dream up interactive features and before I knew it I was knee deep in JavaScript frameworks, fighting build errors and wrangling 3rd party libraries.

My motivation tanked. Weeks went by with me staring into the abyss. Eventually, I asked myself, “Why am I not excited to work on this anymore?”

I found my answer. I had been building out this ambitious interactive header carousel thing but something was wrong. What was it? Was the feature a distraction? Was it tacky? Was it not worth the complexity? Whatever it was, my gut didn’t like it and I just couldn’t move forward. I ended up tearing out that code, trying something a bit simpler, and the motivation came roaring back. I learned a valuable lesson: sometimes your lack of motivation is trying to tell you something.

But I digress. The site finally feels right, so we’re going live even though the code is still a mess. I aspire to tidy it up some more post-launch. 😅

Contribute

One of the goals of this project was to make it easy for anyone to contribute their own creativity tools. If you have a tool you’d like to share, there’s a nice CONTRIBUTING doc that shows you what to do (it’s really just editing this one JSON file).

Besides that, you can also help me clean up my code if you want. Just check out the open issues.