Creative is as creative does, except when your creative spark fizzles out. Looming deadlines, over-fussy clients, dull projects, or feelings of fatigue that may signal the beginnings of burnout, any of these everyday afflictions can tamp down your creative fire, making it tough to come up with creative ideas just when you need them most. But fear not! Denise Jacobs shares sure-fire strategies to reignite your creative spark.
Topic: Creativity
Banishing Your Inner Critic
Everybody has one: the inner critic that tells you you’re just faking it, that others have more talent, that you’ll never achieve the success you seek. The inner critic is an unconscious deterrent that stands between the seeds of great ideas and the fruits of achievement, making you hate your designs, giving you “writer’s block” as your deadline looms, keeping you stuck in a project’s initial thinking stage because something isn’t quite right. Denise Jacobs anatomizes and shows how to quash your inner critic, giving you the mental space and energy to let your true talents emerge.
The Miseducation of the Doodle
The teacher who chastised you for “mindless doodling” was wrong on both counts. Far from shutting down the mind, the act of doodling engages the brain in the kind of visual sense-making people have practiced for over 30,000 years. Doodling sharpens concentration, increases retention, and enhances access to the problem solving unconscious. It activates the portions of the visual cortex that allow us to see mental imagery and manipulate concepts, and unifies three major learning modalities, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Doodle Revolution leader Sunni Brown introduces strategic doodling and presents the ABCs of our shared visual alphabet.
Sketching: the Visual Thinking Power Tool
You don’t have to be a great singer to write a great song, just ask Bob Dylan. Likewise, you needn’t be a Leonardo to draw your way to more and better ideas. Sketching helps you generate concepts quickly, exploring alternatives rapidly and at no cost of resources. The looseness of a sketch removes inhibitions, granting clients and colleagues permission to consider and challenge the ideas it represents. Mike Rohde outlines the practice, surveys the tools, and shares ways to become confident with this method of brainstorming, regardless of your level of artistic ability.
Design Criticism and the Creative Process
In every design project, at some point we quit what we’re doing and share our unfinished work with colleagues or clients. This begs the question: Just what does the critique do for the design and the rest of the project? Do critiques really help and are they necessary? If so, how do we use their inconsistencies to improve our creative output? Cassie McDaniel explores how critiques can help us navigate complex processes and projects and collaborate effectively to create original and engaging work.
Habit Fields
We have the power to bestow our abilities onto the things around us. By being conscious of our tools, habits, and spaces, and actively conditioning them to help us behave the way we want to behave, maybe we can more efficiently tap into the thousands of hours of creative genius embedded in our everyday objects. Maybe we’ll be able to maximize the capabilities that new technologies afford us without being overwhelmed by the distractions. And, just maybe, we’ll remember what it feels like to be utterly engrossed in our daily work.
Redesigning Your Own Site
Redesigning your freelance website is an exercise in masochism. There are no colleagues to share the pain: It’s just you. As the designer who wrote The Art of Self-Branding, freelancer Lea Alcantara knew her site had to be just right. People were bound to scrutinize any update to the design, and she couldn’t afford to damage her credibility. Follow her process as she experiments to find the perfect balance of change and consistency.
Taking the Guesswork Out of Design
Clients, like other humans, often fear what they don’t understand. Daniel Ritzenthaler explains how sound goal-setting, documentation, and communication strategies can bridge the gap between a designer’s intuition and a client’s need for proof.
Look at it Another Way
Before you can solve a user’s problems, you must see them as that user sees them. Once you understand what drives people’s behavior, not only do new ideas flow freely, but the ideas that flow are appropriate and useful. Indi Young tells how to get out of your own way and hear what your users are telling you.
Saving the Spark: Developing Creative Ideas
Ideas are at the heart of every creative process. However, coming up with them can be hard work. Mark Boulton arms us with tools to meet this challenge.
