Night of the Living Creative Block

It's spooky season, which presents the opportunity to talk about one of the scariest phenomena in the design industry - creative block! We've all experienced it at some point, and the frustration it brings isn't limited to the role of designers. To create is to experience being human. Each of us, no matter our professions, engages with our creativity on a daily basis.

For as long as I can remember, everything I did as a kid centered around being creative. To now do this professionally as an adult makes me especially grateful, but I still reminisce on how creatively free I was as a child – because as kids our ideas are unbounded and unrestrained from the fear of negative feedback or overstepping a budget.

A few months ago, I found myself searching for inspiration, struggling with ways to dive back into what I love so much about my work: the creative process.

I believe this is alchemy - taking input from various sources and using that raw material to make something new from a unique perspective. I was in need of more raw material, and more resources to pull from that could help me approach my work in a new way.

This experience is almost universal among creative professions, which is why I wanted to share my process of working through the creative block as productively as possible. When your work hinges on your creativity, it's inevitable that there will be moments where inspiration is MIA, so how do we rediscover our inspiration while also adhering to tight deadlines and budget restrictions?

To bring new energy into my design approach, I started by exploring my interests in other creative fields: sewing, music, dancing, and painting, to name a few. To tap into my child-like curiosity and learn something new evokes a vulnerability and healthy level of fear that undoubtedly shakes something loose for me when it comes to creative block because I am no longer in my comfort zone.

It is also simply refreshing to explore creativity in ways that aren't mediated by a screen. Doing things with my hands like cutting fabric and mixing paint helped me realize how important this tangibility is to my overall process.

For context, I wouldn’t consider myself stellar at any of the practices I listed above, but that’s not really the point. The biggest block in getting started for me is often perfectionism. A perfect result is impossible for a beginner (or anyone, for that matter), so diving into something creative outside of my field is a great opportunity to experience the joy of discovery without the pressure of a "good" result. There's no set deliverable, so exploration and experimentation feel more possible.

I feel so much internal pressure for every idea to be good, to somehow prove myself and my creative capabilities worthy at work. By engaging in something I expect to be bad at, like playing the electric guitar for the first time, the pressure is off because my concept of success for hobbies is different than the lens I view my professional work through. It reminds me that first and foremost, the joy of creative work is in the process itself.

I find that changing my environment or even doing something different from the everyday grind can do wonders for my brain. It can be close to home -like a Retromania event I went to that was FULL of funky design or (even better) leaving the country (if the timing allows of course). I traveled to Panama earlier this year and immediately felt so much more capable of solving design challenges when I returned, despite not touching anything Adobe-related for over a week.

If traveling far distances isn’t feasible, find a space closer to home to find creative respite. For example, after having a tough day a few months ago, I walked around the MFA alone with my headphones in to zoom out and open my mind to other artistic perspectives. For me, it is always great to reenergize my creative juices through the talented work of artists I admire or have yet to discover, especially if we don't work in the same field.

I’ve recently started to practice the art of truly unplugging, aka checking my phone less during idle periods like waiting for the bus. When I go on walks, I tend to leave my phone at home which has helped my mind wander naturally - relieving my digitally-induced anxiety and fueling the creation of nuanced ideas. I think of Bo Burnam's Inside as a great example of the ingenuity that can emerge from more downtime.

In this article by the BBC, author Mason Currey is quoted saying, “My take is that the state that is really good for the creative process is not boredom exactly, but what I would call spacing out. That is, doing something familiar with a kind of diffused focus that allows your mind to wander elsewhere. That’s something I’ve noticed over and over in my research and it seems to be one of the essential elements of the creative process across history.”

Maybe this is why I always produce the best ideas on a long drive or in the middle of a run?

It’s easy to feel like your opportunity to learn new things diminishes considerably after school - at least, I’ve felt that way before. But growing your skillset outside of work doesn't have to be a huge financial investment or time commitment.

I've been taking an online course in digital illustration in recent months because it's something I hope to incorporate more into my future work. Not only does this tie back to my first point about expressing creativity in new ways, but it also helps me build on my professional qualifications and expand the scope of possibilities of what I can do.