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Creativity enables designers to come up with unconventional ideas, attract attention to products, and even set global trends. Let’s explore how to find design hints in everyday life and why discipline is just as important as inspiration.
What Is Creativity?
Creativity for a designer is the ability to go beyond accepted standards when solving a problem.
Here’s an unpopular opinion: a designer doesn’t have to be creative. Many of us choose the craft over bold ideas, performing a set of familiar tasks and following the “rules of the game.” This approach is great when you want to hit the jackpot at an online casino or build a career shortly. However, it also has limitations. A designer who works according to templates finds it harder to be memorable, gain recognition, and build a personal brand.
If you want to stand out and push the industry forward, you need to come up with something new. Have you seen trend collections in design? Each of them results from a designer expressing creativity. Trends don’t catch on immediately; such phenomena arise from a few bold projects.
There is no universal solution. You either follow the rules or try to create your own. The second path is more interesting.
Simple Habits to Help You Find New Solutions
To be creative, it’s not enough to just focus on design. New ideas need a foundation, which daily habits provide. Some of these habits pertain to work, while others involve life’s order in general.
Absorb New Experiences
Approach life as an observer. Try to avoid the routine blindness that prevents you from noticing the interesting things daily.
You never know what will inspire you today: a book you’ve read, birds singing at dawn, or an urban landscape with railway tracks. These examples are not fictional; all of them can be played out in design.
Engage with Other Designers
It’s important for a designer not to stew in their own ideas but to share them, discuss them, and get an outside perspective. Thanks to social networks, this isn’t hard. It’s especially useful to communicate in small, close-knit groups.
Maintain Work-Life Balance
When you’re working on a project and generating ideas, you expend resources. To remain productive, these resources need to be replenished. This general advice can be broken down into two more specific tips.
- Dedicate at least a couple of hours a week to a “date” with yourself. Do something you love alone: visit a gallery, order your favorite dish for dinner, read a book, climb a tree… Whatever it is, the important thing is that you enjoy it!
- Engage in physical activity. It helps you completely switch off and take a break from work.
Maintaining work-life balance is important not just for creativity — our bodies have their limits, and if we don’t respect them, they will enforce them, possibly through burnout or even a nervous breakdown.
It’s also important to meditate and develop mindfulness. Trm may have been popularized in a somewhat negative light, but it’s a useful skill. It helps you monitor your thoughts, body, and emotions, allowing you to notice problems in time and work on them.
A study by scientists at Leiden University in the Netherlands showed that meditation not only helps you relax but also stimulates creative thinking. That sounds like a reason to at least give it a try.
Develop Visual Literacy
Our ideas don’t come out of nowhere. Often, they are interpretations and reimaginings of other projects and styles, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s important for a designer to see what others are doing.
To do this, surround yourself with inspiring works: follow your favorite designers, artists, or studios and just watch what they post. You can also purposefully immerse yourself in projects and analyze them. Ask yourself questions like: Why do I like this? Why does it work? How did the designer think? Is there something in this project that bothers me?
Besides Behance, we recommend checking out works on Dribbble, ArtStation, and Instagram.
Work Regularly
A quote attributed to Mozart says: “Success is 5% talent and 95% hard work.” This rule also applies to design. Without discipline and regularity, it’s hard to achieve results.
Develop self-discipline and don’t be afraid to make mistakes — it’s a natural and important part of your growth. Start with small goals and gradually complicate them. Set your priorities and focus on them. Remember the need for regular rest and self-analysis to maintain high productivity and prevent burnout.
Never Stop Learning
Designers are constantly learning because the field is changing very quickly. To develop creativity, we recommend taking courses that aren’t directly related to design. Sometimes breakthrough ideas come at the intersection of different competencies.
For example, a clothing designer needs to understand fabrics and tailoring techniques, an industrial designer needs to know about various materials, aerodynamics, and how devices work, while an interior designer should be knowledgeable about electricity, ventilation, paint, tiles, wallpaper, and people’s daily habits.
A digital designer should have a good understanding of what happens in the code. If you’re creating websites, it’s useful to know HTML and CSS, different approaches to layout, and how to use a web inspector. If you’re developing iOS apps, it’s important to understand tools and APIs.
Don’t Take Work Personally
The looming deadline, messages from the client, and other stress factors can make it hard to focus on the task at hand. Cultivate the habit of detachment. Here’s a life hack: if anxiety arises, imagine that a fellow designer found themselves in the same situation with the same task and asked for your advice. What would you tell them? And what idea would you suggest?
Thirty Minutes to Creativity: Daily Exercises
If you want to incorporate creativity training into your daily routine, you can create briefs for yourself and set small challenges. Some of these life hacks can also be used when looking for ideas to view a task from a new angle.
Solve a Problem in Multiple Ways
Come up with three solutions when tackling a task. The most standard — an idea that lies on the surface. The most daring — even you think it’s too bold. And a compromise is somewhere in between. If you’re not working on a brief right now, create a task or take a past one. You can also use tasks from contests, hackathons, or friends.
Introduce the Practice of “Morning Pages”
The essence of the “Morning Pages” exercise is this: every morning, write down all your thoughts, expectations for the day, fears, and doubts in a notebook. This will reduce anxiety, structure your plans, and get rid of intrusive thoughts that constantly circulate in your mind.
Set Yourself a Brief With Restrictions
Create a task for yourself and intentionally complicate it. For example: execute a design using only two colors. Or: draw an illustration using only typography.
It may seem that strict rules will reduce the number of ideas. But in reality, the opposite is true: constraints often stimulate imagination and help move away from tried-and-true templates.
Step Into Someone Else’s Shoes
This group of exercises includes at least three techniques. The first is called “Six Thinking Hats.” Imagine that you have six hats of different colors:
- Blue, in which you formulate the task and goals of the creative process.
- White, where you are responsible for facts and figures.
- Red, in which you express emotions and follow intuition.
- Black, in which you criticize what’s happening and assess risks.
- Yellow, which helps you look at the process optimistically and “argue” with the black hat.
- Green, in which you propose ideas, including the boldest ones.
Try on the hats one by one, simulating a dialogue among designers. Or make actual paper hats and distribute them to the team during a brainstorming session.
The second method is “Changing Persona.” Imagine you are someone else and ask yourself: how would X solve this problem?
The third technique is called “Dreamer-Realist-Critic.” It’s similar to the “Six Thinking Hats” method, except here there are only three roles: the dreamer suggests the most ambitious ideas, the realist creates a clear plan to solve the problem, and the critic finds issues and challenges in both approaches.
Find a Connection Between Random Objects
Open any book and choose two words on a random page. Write them down and try to create a story with these words. Let’s say you chose “knee” and “sand.” The words seem unrelated to design. Your task is to come up with a story that logically weaves them into the professional sphere.
Try the “Creative Architect” Technique
Write down ten nouns on a sheet of paper: for example, “apple,” “tree,” or “hockey stick.” Then imagine you’re an architect, and the client has tasked you with designing a country house incorporating these ten nouns. For example, the apple could be used in wallpaper designs or in the garden, the tree for staircase railings, and the hockey stick for designing a backyard rink.
Limit Yourself to a Minute
Try to find as many solutions to a problem as possible in 60 seconds. You probably won’t develop the ideas deeply enough, but you might stumble upon the perfect solution before your inner skeptic can dismiss it. This technique can be used in a team.
Use a Pencil Instead of a Mouse
Try making the first draft of a design not in Figma or Photoshop, but with a pencil on paper. This allows you to capture everything your imagination offers in the freest form possible, without the constraints of graphic editors.
Reinvent the Wheel
Think of a soda or fast-food chain logo. Now try to create your own. Coca-Cola might not adopt your ideas, but you might come up with a non-obvious solution for something familiar, which could be useful in one of your projects.
