Last year I set my self a challenge: Make something, at least twice a week, no matter how dumb.
Some quick back story:
I had worked in a fast paced agency environment for a few years, I found that months had gone past without me making anything design related, outside of the office, for myself. I was feeling drained and uninspired. Hours of intense, detail-oriented design projects meant all I wanted to do once I escaped the office was to go home and play something mind numbing on PS4, or better yet, just sleep. I had a list of small ideas I thought would be fun to make into “design projects” but was too burned out to execute any of them.
I had always loved the book A Smile In The Mind by Beryl McAlhone and David Stuart. The designers featured seemed to be able to find wit in anything with ease; a single image, word or visual twist. How could I train myself to get to that level of idea creation?
Eventually I ended up having the pleasure of being mentored by Design Director Michael Kleinmann (now at Droga5 in New York). He opened my eyes to the idea of carving out a short amount of time each day just to make SOMETHING. He encouraged me to start a blog and just start putting things on it, not being precious or over analysing the creative process, and to take risks — try something new.
At the same time I stumbled on Topher McCulloch’s blog Make Something Awful Every Day and his mantra of “Practice makes perfect, but awful makes practice”.
It all made sense.
Learning new things didn’t have to be this lightning bolt of divine inspiration, nor did it have to be hours of slaving over some new tool or technique, trying to mold it into something beautiful. Surely doing SOMETHING with an idea when it strikes is better than putting it on the back-burner and forgetting about it, especially when it comes to reactive content. Why couldn’t I just make a meme or a dumb drawing and move on? We often learn best by our mistakes, so make them frequently, and quickly.
I set myself some guidelines for a disposable design challenge:
- Approximately 30 minutes per idea
- There was no such thing as a bad idea
- Try something I hadn’t before. Not an illustrator? Who cares. Only just dabbled in AfterEffects? Better fire up some YouTube tutorials.
- Whatever I had at the end of 30 mins, post on my blog and let it go
It was kind of liberating to begin a project knowing I would probably fail, and that was ok. Suddenly my backlog of creative ideas that would never get made started getting shorter, as I stopped being precious with them and instead applied my disposable design principle to them. It became clear after 30 minutes whether an idea was worth investing more time and energy into it.
We often learn best by our mistakes, so make them frequently, and quickly.
The validation for this experiment came when I eventually got a brief for an actual job (with clients and money and everything!) where a design style I had been messing with for half an hour a few weeks ago was exactly the right way to approach the brief.
I’ve ended up expanding this principle to include a developer friend of mine, where we very quickly create a prototype of simple, single-focused, sometimes idiotic ideas, to evaluate their feasibility. This way ideas don’t end up gathering dust in development hell. We’ve made an “is it raining” tool where it’s always raining, a tool that tells you when to put out your bins (only working in Sydney City right now), and are working on a 3D egg painting tool for Easter.
As designers it’s easy for us to get caught up in the details, and that’s important, especially when you’re designing something that users will be spending hours with, or is going to be the backbone of a campaign involving lots of other components. But when it comes to simply creating because we live and breathe design, let’s not get too precious to just make something, evaluate its worth, and either iterate or move on.
