Trying to Be Creative

I'm trying to be creative in coming up with something beautiful, cool and useful, but it is slow work. Everything just takes too long. And when I look at the ideas that others come up, I'm in awe and want to do the same. How do others come up with something so beautiful? How do others figure out cool ways of doing things? Where do the ideas come from?

I've spent the day trying to come up with a nice, clean, understandable "dashboard" that hopefully will be of use but like I said before, it is slow going. In order to simplify at the front end and yet offer sufficient flexibility, the back end has to be extremely complicated. Sometimes I want to do something but Excel will give off an ugly result so I have to come up with a convoluted way to get at the vision I have in my head.

Today I worked on a scroll bar which is a new thing for me and it looks cool. I also created a conditional formatting that indicates with green, yellow or red circles whether something is above the norm, in the range of the norm, or below the norm. The problem with the conditional formatting is that it is giving ugly results so I'm going to have to alter the approach a little to make the "dashboard" look nicer.

I'm also going to have to dig into why my totals are not matching the grand totals indicated in one report. I'm missing something.

One thing I worry about is how big this file will become. I still have a lot to do tomorrow since I want to get as much of it done as possible. I need to get back at the ACA problem...if the software has been approved.

Two books that have been whetting my appetite with gorgeous pictures: Graphic Design Thinking by Ellen Lupton and Your Ideas Starts Here by Carolyn Eckert. They are the reason for my moaning in the first paragraph.

Even tonight's post feel kind of ucky. I hope tomorrow brings better solutions.