Creative Block
It happens to the best of us. One week, you are on a roll with designs, and you start getting more confidence in your skills, and then you hit a brick wall. You try churning out all these different thoughts into a design, and nothing is working. The harder you try to get creative, the harder is becomes to be creative.
Creative block is one of the most frustrating things that can happen to me as a designer. Not only because it gets hard for me to crank out ideas, but it makes be question my skills as a designer. I imagine that I’m not the only one who thinks like this. It’s almost stressful that I start to question myself as a designer because I hit this creative block a few days ago, and can’t seem to slip out.
So how do I get out of this rut? For the past few days I’ve been scouring the web for fresh inspiration, and I’ve come to realize, that the web is just not where I’m going to find it. Being in the middle of this whole “web 2.0″ era, everything is starting to look the same. I try checking out different sites in my feeds, people who they link to, and even one or two CSS galleries. And still, nothing.
In Cameron Moll’s “Nine skills that separate good and great designers“, he mentions that great designers find inspiration from their whole environment, rather than just their genre. Normally, everything inspires me, however as of lately, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t made time to get away from my computer. So it’s obvious now that I need to get the hell away from my computer and maybe head to a bookstore or something. Because I won’t gut out of this creative block unless I get away from my computer.
5 Comments
I am always at my most creative when Im surrounded by a pleasant atmosphere; sun coming in through the window, bright and warm air, etc.
When I am authoring serious documents and articles I just cannot work in my moderate-to-dark little office. It’s soul crushing!
Yeah I think it’s my work environment. It’s not the most inspiring work station. It’s amazing how much your work environment influences your creativity.
I laughed when I read this because that’s exactly what I used to do - scour the Web (mostly Photoshop and graphic design sites) looking for inspiration. Now I can find inspiration even sitting at the computer in my own home; the wet leaf stuck to my window, a haphazard stack of magazines on the carpet, the sun angling through the convoluted branches of the maple tree outside. I think this change of perspective came one day when I realized that inspiration is simply a state of mind. If you’re hungry, you eat. If you want to be inspired, you eat what you see.
That’s a very interesting perspective about inspiration being a state of mind. I guess for me, sometimes I fall out of that state of mind.
[...] So there you have it. Those are some ways that I think always help to perfect your craft. Often, when I keep doing these things, they help to avoid the unfriendly creative block. What way do you think help better yourself as a designer/developer? [...]