Designers, Don’t Worry About Being the Most Creative.
Is it okay for people in the design industry to practice and celebrate creativity in the extreme like other similar industries do? Chris Do, an Emmy award-winning director, designer, strategist, and educator made a video where he challenges creativity’s place in the design world.
“Clients don’t choose the best option. They choose the least risky option. You need to appear as the least risky option.”
Creativity in excess for a designer is risky. A designer’s best work is often not their most creative, but rather one that brings the most value for the client and minimizes the most risk for their business. To an inexperienced designer, the idea of being the most creative might equate to being the best. However, this is not true.
Creativity is the act of combining your ideas and life experiences to synthesize a new idea. In excess, it can cause us to become blind to our true goal: solving the problem. It can also lead to burnout. When overexerting creativity on a task that doesn’t need it, one can find themselves struggling to find solutions because they’ve already disregarded the simple solution.
Clearly defining the goals at the start of a project and then aligning our creativity to those goals leads to a better end product. By keeping those defined goals in mind throughout the design process, we can get better results in less time. This often does not work in reverse. Goals are almost always rigid so that they can be attainable. Furthermore, trying to align goals with creativity may cause friction. For designers who are struggling to complete client work due to dealing with this friction, I recommend trying the KISS method to reassess what the project’s goals are.
In college, I took visual arts classes as part of my major. I noticed that these classes celebrated creativity and given my competitive nature, I assumed that being the most creative would lead to the most success in class. My art projects began to get excessive because I put too much emphasis on presenting as many ideas as I could into one piece without stopping to think about what my goals were. I was tearing them apart trying to make them go in every direction at the same time and they never actually went anywhere because of that.
After graduating, I began to seek out knowledge on the design industry and that was when I stumbled upon Chris Do’s video. It set me free from the unrealistic expectations of creativity that I had naively set for myself.
As professional designers, we cannot allow our client’s projects to go nowhere. We cannot use their problems to indulge in our creativity because we are hired as problem solvers, not artists. A nice aesthetic and visuals may be part of solving their problems. However, it will often not be the key component that actually solves it.
Chris Do’s point is a short answer to the larger problem of excessive creativity in the design field. In order for growth to occur, we need to let go of our desire for creative fulfillment, and take on the responsibility of focusing on our client’s problems.
