Anyone else annoyed that they can code a really good website (as in PSD to HTML) but just aren't creative enough to come up with a design? I find myself on Dribbble a hell of a lot of the time coding designs that others have done out of boredom, but stunned by how amazing their designs are. I'm just not creative enough.

it's a skillet, just like any other, dude. web design is a totally learnable skill.

hah! skillet. I meant skill set.

A great misconception is that anyone can design. I taught design part time at University for a number of years. It takes time to understand a plethora of things that go in to design. If you start with the aesthetic. You are doing it wrong.

I'm not the only one then... Phew.

I'm an expert at photoshop. I know all the keyboard shortcuts and can change things on the fly, but I can not create anything new conceptually. It's annoying.

I have a guy in my office who knows nothing about photoshop or designing for the web, but creates design masterpieces. Doesn't know how to save them correctly for web, flattens too much, doesn't know how to represent anything on mobile. It too is annoying.

Give me any design and I'll turn it into a clean, syntactically correct, SEO friendly webpage with as few possible hacks as possible.
Give me a concept and tell me to design it and I'll stare at a blank page for the rest of the day.

I find design a lot harder than coding! I've done both in a professional environment. It's very hard to please clients, and especially hard to please yourself 😩

I feel you.

@kwilliams -- spot on! Exactly what I meant

You have to be aware and recognize your weaknesses as much as you do your strengths. After all, that's the idea of a team.

After 10 years of playing both designer and developer, I finally acknowledged there are more creative people who are better at designing software; I made peace with it and make sure I fulfill my part of the job as well as they do theirs.

Developer by day but I've managed to come up the odd bit of good stuff.

Hold off on opening up your design software for a while or you'll try to fill a whole blank canvas in the first five mins (at least I do).

Pick 5 or so key tasks your site is supposed to allow users to complete

Look at 20ish similar sites, note the bits you like which might help your users to achieve these.

By the time you've done this, you'll find you've a ton of ideas. More screen space for higher priority tasks.

I feel you. I can't even come up with a unique idea for a website period.

This is why templates and Bootstrap is great though. I can at least get a rolling model going that looks half decent. I can focus more on code and functionality, which I do best.