Being creative in something is not natural. The habit of becoming inspired from others make you creative in a little sense. You watch others art and you have some ambition in yourself created which make you creative at one end. For example you sees some one design and you keep in mind the design and one day you try to make the similar design yourself. Similarly if some code so beautiful then you get some inspiration from him and try to code like him/her.
So follow these steps to become creative in your design and development:-
Watch what other creative people are doing:-
You can join seminars and others exhibition near you which shows creative ideas of people and who are inventing new things. Just note some salient features in their designs and try to make similar like designs yourself.
Write some code and get more output:-
When you try to write some code to get maximum output then absolutely your code runs fast and more risibly. Try to write as short code as you can. For example if we take a little example of css. Some features of css can be achieved by writing small code i.e. using some css libraries and following their pattern.
Download popular open source codes:-
People are making and distributing most of their work for free. For example take wordpress repository. There are thousands of plugins available. You can download any plugin and start studying, how they achieve decent functionality in it. You can follow how classes and functions are organized and how they perform the tasks. There are also some coding available for download on different tutorial sites. Download the coding and start learning the coding standards and try to follow them.
Frameworks are good example to follow:-
There are different open source frameworks available by which you can understand the structure and coding standards. Look closely on the files organized and how make their code run faster. If you are a php developer then you can choose wordpress or codeigniter. WordPress is a cms but it really helps you lot to learn and start your own small cms. Similary you can take a look at codeigniter and follow the anatomy of files and coding. The more you learn from popular coding, the more you become creative.
The eyes and view of site plays an important role. For example you print some design of websites and place the printed papers on a table and try to note the important aspects of the design and how the navigation and other pages are communicated. This way you will come up with a new design, may be more creative than the previous ones.
Hope you now understands the basic concepts of becoming creative for your own. No one in the earth has born as creative. They inspect the other people work and try to make a new look.