Vev x Awwwards: Fixing The Way We Create On The Web

Wondering why it’s still so hard for professionals with original ideas to create on the web?

At Vev, we’re obsessed with answering this question. In fact, we’ve dedicated ourselves to solving it! We were honored to be invited to talk at Awwwards’ annual Digital Thinkers Conference in Amsterdam to share how we’re approaching this at Vev, and to meet so many like-minded creatives pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on the web.

As you can see from our photos, we had an amazing time! For those of you who couldn’t make it—or simply want a slice of Vev thinking—we've broken down the core issues that limit creative freedom on the web today, and how we're working to solve them for good.

As creatives, we sell imagination; it’s what our businesses are built on. Imagination builds our clients’ brands, wins awards, and makes our agencies stand out.

At Vev, the majority of our customers—internationally renowned publishers and creative agencies—tell us they want to produce more creative work above increasing profitability. They recognize that imagination is profitability. So, if we are going to try and fix the way the world currently creates on the web, we need to focus on removing the things that hold our imagination back.

We founded Vev in 2017 to do exactly that. Over the years, we’ve interrogated the complex, sprawling, and deeply systemic issues that stifle creative freedom on the web. We’ve identified three blockers that seem to be fundamental—ones that affect developers, designers, marketers, and managers creating together on the web—which we group as follows:

• The technical minefield
• Tension between design and code
• Conveyor belt thinking

Here’s a quick summary of how and why we are approaching these problems at Vev to help professional teams publish their wildest ideas on the web with complete creative and technical freedom.

Have you ever started a project and immediately hit a wall when deciding what tech to use and what existing stacks need to be taken into account before even starting? This is what we call the technical minefield—it’s where creativity is determined by tech, instead of the other way around. The two most common issues at this stage are: not being able to pick the tech stack for your client; and having to adapt to legacy CMS or headless CMS already in use.

To solve this, we need to design tools that offer us true technical freedom, meaning:

• Freedom to think beyond client tech stacks
• Freedom to continue using the tools you love
• Freedom to connect existing work, wherever it exists
• Freedom to publish anywhere on the web
• Freedom to leave tools that no longer work for you

At Vev, technical freedom means adopting an “open” approach to technology. Instead of fighting or trying to replace your entire toolkit, we want Vev to seamlessly fit into it. Workflow compatibility, client tech stacks, and vendor lock-in are no longer an issue.

Designers still dread “the handoff”: the process of handing a perfect design over for development, and the creative compromise that often follows. Yet developers aren’t the problem here—they too get that sinking feeling when they are handed a design they can’t possibly implement.

Almost every creative team working on the web still experiences this tension. At Vev, we think it is completely manufactured by the linear approach to creative projects that mentally and often physically separates design and code in web creation, and it’s something we have to completely rethink in order to produce our best work.

We believe the solution lies in championing creative equality: making it easier for technical and non-technical creatives to combine their crafts. Vev is finding the balance between code and no-code to help people with zero knowledge of CSS and HTML, as well as those who know programming languages, to create amazing work together from one space. That’s why Vev is designed around three different editors: one for visual designing, one for custom coding, one for editing.

Creativity is a messy process with back and forths and collaboration at its heart. Yet, current platforms and workflows are designed only to look forward; they rarely allow room to experiment with new approaches and explore concepts in an agile way. This pressures creative teams to fix ideas early and never adapt them. It also makes it all too easy to reach for a past solution to a problem—imitating and recycling ideas, instead of innovating.

Our solution to this? Constant play.  Experiment, go backwards to go forwards, and fully explore the wild creative concepts that clients can rarely grasp at initial pitch. Creativity needs time and space to thrive, and it should be at the core of our workflow. As creatives, we all need to build workflows and systems that help us become better creative communicators in order to find those sparks of ideas that can take the concept in a new and brilliant direction.

That’s why we’re building Vev to help teams work in circles instead of lines—giving everyone the freedom to explore different directions, easily create living prototypes, and change whole sections of a coded concept at any point during a project without derailing budgets or timelines.

Watch the full awwwards. talk now

Ready to experience the future of web creation?

Vev is a new breed of web creation platform built for developers, designers, and marketers. Combining code and no-code development, it provides a single space for teams to create anything front-end on the web—from websites, landing pages, reports, presentations, and beyond. Publish your work anywhere on the web when you’re ready.