Playing with a responsive layout

Fluid layout is the best way to communicate across media. For this reason, it needs more preparation and tools than old website design did, because it requires more technically challenging measurements.

Below are a series of "ready to pick and use" examples that will help me to develop faster and quicker all that I need for web development. So I developed this page filled with examples of prepared layouts to use in a variety of combinations. With this, I can achieve most of the work that really needs to be done in a simpler and quicker way than building from scratch.

The residue of time wasted

For 6 months I stepped away from my daily job, experimenting new experiences, following unexpected and different paths to discover new insights, open up new opportunities, and find new joys and pleasures, from which I learned a very important lesson: in life, if you waste enough time, you will find a big and valuable source of creativity waiting for you to be tapped.

Thanks to all this free time, I had the opportunity to discover new important things about myself; about what I like and am able to do that, before, I never let myself try for lack of money, time or courage. I could finally write poetry, experiment with painting, try calligraphy, start to learn to play the piano, be paid as photographer and act on a stage in front of an audience public by doing theatrical improvisation. All those new experiences helped a lot in so many different ways, and came about because I put myself in a frame of mind away from stress or tight deadlines.

I realised something important: when you are wasting enough time of your life, your brain cannot stay idle, it will be automatically pushed to be inspired to do or towards something that it will lead to new experiences; things that normally are different from the routine of your daily life. You will start to get hungry and foolish in wanting to make things with your hands, to travel, to read more, to learn and assimilate other kinds of experiences and new life perspectives. You will feel inspired to follow your own visionary dreams.

Creativity is the residue of time wasted.

Albert Einstein

The trick it is not to waste your time, for the sake of doing nothing, sleeping or being lazy, but to be able to put your brain in a conscious status of relaxing itself, and let your inner stimulus pass through the dark waters of your worries and rise up to the surface of what you want to do with yourself.

When you start to have the first stimulus, for example writing a new novel, keep at it. Do not let your first steps be stopped by self-criticism and by your inexperience. Let simply go and lose yourself in the wave of newly rising creativity. Nothing that you are making will be ever wrong, it is a discovery, and discovery needs a lot of false starts to get into what you want to achieve.

To be able to zone out, you need to take a good amount of time away from distractions (family, phones, Facebook, etc), put yourself in the right physical environment (for example: outside your bedroom, in a painting workshop area, in a café, at the park or in a quiet street) to focus on a specific task that will intrigue you. You will come out at the end of the journey of experimenting with new interesting results and possibilities.

Do whatever it is that gets you to stop thinking, relax and enter the zone of creativity. In that moment, you will find that you will have ideas, inspirations and new skills that you would like to experience. You will know that you are in the zone when time simply flies away without you noticing, and you'll have a big smile on your face.

The life lesson here is: we need to make more time for ourselves; to waste it happily in some personal projects without the stress of making big achievements, just the pleasure to play with whatever triggers and stimulates our own imagination. You don’t always know where you’re going to end up when you start to explore new possibilities in this way, but I assure you that the results will surprise and inspire you further.

This normal process it is part of the creativity attitude that live inside all of us, and it is made by things like curiosity, playfulness and the desire of developing personal ideas that we dream about, those stimulations leads you often on interesting path and new discoveries, and sometimes it makes you do such great leaps of creativity that you can really became a great visionary.

For example italian writer Italo Calvino explaining about how his book Invisible Cities (a book that talks about cities that do not exist in reality but that feel somehow very familiar to the one that exist) he was created. He explain in details his unusual creative process which more or less translate into those words:

Into writing I work in series: I have many folders where I put pages that I happen to write about the ideas that happen casually in my head, otherwise I write only the notes of things that I would like to write about. I have a folder for the inanimate objects, one folder for animals, one for people, one for the historical characters and another for the heroes of the myths; I have a folder on the four seasons and one for the five senses; in one I collect pages on the cities and the backgrounds of my life and in another imaginary cities, out of space and time. When a folder start to be very full of papers, I start to think to the book that I can make out of it.

What I dig out of from his process is that it is important to create all the time that we are inspired about anything (or at least take notes on things that we would like to do so that we don't forget), and not to force creation in making something at last minute and in a very quick way when we are not focused or inspired. Only when inspired and we are willing to follow our curiosity in any possible directions with any limitations, we can brainstorm productively creating original and unique putting our passion at his maximum output of creativity. And if we have no time or resources to develop them, we can always store those ideas and take them out when they will be more ripen. Your brain has an incredible ability to still work incounciously on the background of other daily activities.

To simplify the concept I narrow down on three simple principles:

• Recycle — What happen that I create for work or in my spare time (and is left unused) because it could be useful for other ideas and projects.
• Fun — Be curious and play with everything inspiring to create (even not work related) because it always leads to learn new things, to acquire a different prospective or to develop better ideas.
• Archive — Ideas on what I would like to use or create (but I do not have the time right now) because when there will be more time the idea can be still carry on, or make new creative connections in the future that will make the initial idea to be much more effective with a new combination.

Those new creative approach of doing things when we feel it, more than when we need it, it allow me to have more interesting material after a period of time from which I can make something unique out of it, instead of just imitating and stealing other people ideas, but more than anything it will allow me to see more potential creative patterns where other do not.

As a very important skill, creativity even if it is not distributed evenly between all the people we can definitely improve it, train it and be better at using it and controlling it at will. Therefore, we have to allow to each of us time and passion in falling in love with anything that we like and give an honest opportunity to make something out of it, even if it at first we feel that is something completely useless. Training your own creative process by making things that we really enjoy, it will help you in having a more positive attitude, open minded to various kind of opportunity and situations, and have unique and very valuable insights.

Be ready for new discoveries and waste your time more often. You will discover the magic in the doing after freely thinking from constrictions.