Do not give "creative" freedom to your developers. They'll churn out Picasso-style masterpieces that nobody would ever understand or dare to touch.

Could you elaborate on the madness?

true, that's why for the longest time the web looked horrible as it wasn't designed by someone who cared about usability and graphic design. It was designed by an engineer who cared only about technical feasibility.
So Arial, Times New Roman, Courier and Verdana it was.

It needed people who cared about otther humans and not machines to gradually correct that. Typography, color and proportions matter in order to deliver information human readable. Graphic Designers.

"Don't give your devs" - or get into the mindset that devs are reasonable adults that you can actually talk to. I know, radical idea.

Depends on the project.

When you're creating an MMO, the game mechanics should be more creative than the invoicing system. For a forum, the spamfilter should be less artsy than the landing page — etc

If you're building a city, some parts should be reliable and exact, like bridges, other parts can be creative and expressive, like statues.

You're hiring the wrong Devs.

Give good Devs creative freedom and they'll work with appropriate tools, languages, Frameworks etc. and turn out something fantastic. Stifle those Devs and you'll get a bunch of crap, and they'll likely end up leaving out of frustration.

@AlmondSauce oh the irony
No offense but you just confirmed the stereotype of the dev nerd who only cares about tech and not about the people which will use the product.
Resulting in the "nobody would ever understand or dare to touch" @arvx is talking about. 😉 👍

@heyheni I'm not sure how. Are we talking about creative freedom here in terms of development, or something else? Clearly you shouldn't hire devs and then get them to apply their creative freedom unchecked on customer engagement, UX, business requirements, web design, etc. - that would be madness. (But I don't know anyone who does that either.)

Freedom in terms of the code they write, the tools they use, languages they use etc. (where practical) however? Absolutely. There's a limit of course - there's always "just graduated Bob" that wants to rewrite the entire thing in Rust because he read a Youtube video about it for instance. But if you hire a good team of devs, they'll take the business requirements and come to good, collective, and creative decisions about how to structure, write and run that code in the best way possible.

If wanting to have creative freedom to write great code and make positive suggestions where appropriate negatively stereotypes me, then so be it 🤷‍♂️