Sometimes it’s nothing more than a distraction from a hard problem, a way for us to escape.

Sometimes people assume that all inspiration is of equal value, and that it’s the only thing good work needs.

But sometimes it works for us.

Sometimes it’s powerful.

Sometimes it gives us the feeling that the universe is talking to us, helping us coalesce a group of erratic ideas into elegance, giving our ideas an edge often hidden.

Great products and designs are sometimes built in this afterglow.

“… creativity is hard, highly skilled work that is often quite unromantic in its execution, but is ultimately a source of deeper satisfaction than any short-lived eureka moment could ever deliver.”

Cal Newport

We can wax poetic about it for hours, but there’s a simple fact we can’t escape:

When “inspiration” does arrive, it more likely to be the kind that distracts or quickly fizzles, rather than a brilliant and bespoke solution.

It’s a rare genius whom can claim, with any believability, to have their muse on speed dial.

The right kind of inspiration arrives at random, rarely when we need it most.

But we can do a few things to encourage it’s arrival.

It’s Better to Charm Inspiration Before it Charms You

A deep understanding is the fertile ground from which an inspired usable idea will sprout.

But how do we water the thing so it might find some sunlight?

We can’t guarantee it’s arrival, but there are a number of things that seems to encourage its growth.

But these tasks aren’t just good for inspiring inspiration, they also get the work done whether we feel the spark or not. So it’s win-win. Or maybe, win-giant-win.

1. Be alone. For a really, really long time.

Go for a walk. Get away from your computer. Turn off your phone. Book yourself out in your calendar. Dedicate your time to your problem and only your problem. Protect this time. Not twenty or thirty minutes, but hours.

Einstein would escape for long walks when he was stuck on an idea. Steve Jobs, too.

Giving ourselves some physical space away from a problem we can’t solve gives us the mental space to work it through.

Without the easy-to-find distractions that find their home on our desks, computers, and phones, it’s hard to be “inspired” to disappear down an unproductive rabbit hole.

I’ve always loved how well-read designers are. I use to think it was an easy answer (“we like books”), but I’m starting to see a nuance – long quiet moments, even if in the mind of another, are good for us.

2. Appreciate Failures

The moment we realise an idea has failed, no matter the scale, we’re already past it.

The mistake has been made.

Then, if we let it, the good thing about failure happens. We get the chance to understand what went wrong and set about fixing it.

With a willingness to dig through the fragments of a broken idea so that we can find understanding , we can find happiness and meaning in moment of failure.

A failure is the evidence of us pushing past our creative experience and knowledge. Taking the opportunity to understand the failure means we’re not only inching closer to the right solution, but becoming better designers.

Avoiding failure will only build our defences up. Inspired ideas, even the good ones, tend to arrive when we have our walls down and are open to new, even failure-happy, options.

3. Gain Deep Understanding.

Good solutions come from deep knowledge of the audience and their problem, and how the client and their product can help.

But that only gets us half way.

It isn’t enough to fully understand a problem if you cannot think of what the solution might look like, let alone know how to get there.

That means having a deep understanding of our craft.

What makes up the basics of this knowledge will take another few thousand words to even scratch at, but let’s see if we can do it in a sentence:

Deep understanding of your craft is knowing why what you’re doing will get you what you want.

For designers that means grasping the theory of our elements, of how best to talk, of how the audience will respond to what is said, what has and hasn’t worked in the past, and most of all, how to make sure what is being done is working (that means failing quickly enough to get to another failure quickly, repeatedly, until the failures turn into wins).

The better we can give shape to the ideas the right kind of inspiration gives us, the more likely we’re going to keep getting those ideas.

Persistance and Loops

At this point I have to pluck out the reoccurring theme going on here:

The more often we do something the more likely we can do something.

Yikes, that’s awkward.

Let’s try again:

The more often we work with for the right kind of inspiration, the more likely it’ll arrive.

Or even better:

The more inspired we’ve been the more inspired we’ll be.

It starts off seeming random, but the more often we do the right thing with our inspiration, when we put it to work on the right kind of problems, I think we’re teaching ourselves something.

We’re making roads in our memory of what happens when the right kind of idea to the right kind of problem arrives, and how it can lead us to a solution that, simply, works and makes us happy.

The brain digs this. It wants us to be happy.

So if we want the right kind of inspiration, then we have to be diligent enough to do the work when it shows up with the right answers.

It’s a curious, circular, thing to note, but one worth remembering.

Just Say Yes.

The quickest way to find distraction is to start working on a project, so it’s no surprise how easily we can confuse distraction with inspiration that will lead to good solution.

The best thing to do once the good stuff arrives is to not shy away from the work of it, delving into some other inspired idea, but to chase after it and work for your inspired idea so that it might work for you.

Say yes to the work, even when it’s tough.

Say yes to the effort, even when it’s asking too much.

Say yes to showing up and working through the process that might make inspiration work harder.

And most of all, say yes to working through it even when inspiration doesn’t show up. The outcome will be better for it (at the very least it’ll exist), and chances are people will ask with splashes of astonishment and jealousy, “where do you get your inspiration?”

At its best, inspiration looks like work.

The post 3 Ways to Charm (Powerful) Inspiration first appeared on Retinart.

But so often we hear about this inspirational myth of how it moved him toward his theory of gravity.

To be honest, I’m not even sure if there’s any truth to the story.

But it’s a myth that raises a problem that us designers are annoyingly familiar with. It ignores all the hard work that went before the moment.

Newton didn’t suddenly realise that gravity existed. What he saw was a moment of beauty.

A beauty, an inspiration, only obvious because of work done, only encouraging because of a deep understanding already had. A moment useable, workable, valuable, only because there was a space for it to be of use, for it do work, for it to be worth something.

“The oversimplification of discovery makes science appear far less rich and complex than it really is.”

Leonard Mlodinow

Spicing up the apple falling story with inspiration just makes for a meal that is, well, kind of gross.

It suggests that the luck of fleeting moments is worth more than hard-won knowledge and experience.

Between the lines, most of us (people, designer designers, though, maybe) use it as a way to gloat that our inspired ideas are as valuable as that of any ol’ genius.

It gives reason to think that all inspired ideas are of equal value and that, puff, we too shall be graced by fate.

Let’s talk about the inspired _design_ ideas, and the fruits that we, and seemingly everyone around us, have seen fall.

Clients Seeing More Than Just Apples Falling

How often have you had a client treat you as if you were nothing more than a knowledgable user of software?

How often have you had clients or friends or family who’ve had a spark or two of inspiration, and think all that’s standing between their ideas and yours is a few Adobe icons?

Or how about you? How often have you gotten high off a great burst of energy, off sparks and inspiration, then set to work, with all those icons in the dock, and then … stopped, completely empty…

This is how the myth of inspiration hurts the stories others have of us, and even the stories we tell of ourselves.

The Inspiration Myth tells us that a great idea is all that’s needed, and seeing as we all have great ideas, then surely, one of them will be enough and it just needs to be given shape, but that’s just easy and simple and comes from pressing a few buttons and scratching a few sketches, both of which, as well as the reading and researching and planning and testing and understanding can be so easily lost in the shadow drawn from the glow of a special and precious little spark.

The Inspiration Myth tricks us into thinking that an idea is worth more than work.

A Myth To Protect Us

This idea rubs you the wrong way, doesn’t it? Even if you agree with it, there’s a part of you that hates it.

I do, too. I desperately want to protect this myth of inspiration.

The Myth works well for us in two ways, as we tell ourselves that:

1. We work with ideas every day and one day one of those ideas will be something extraordinary, all we have to do is wait.
2. We aren’t achieving what we dream of because we’re still waiting.

In one swoop the Inspiration Myth gives us super powers and keeps us protected.

We trick ourselves into working lightly, softly, barely, because we hold out hope that inspiration will surely show up any minute now, to help make our hollow efforts substantial or even powerful.

Then when things don’t go our way, we use the myth to explain away mediocre work – we just weren’t inspired.

Running through this routine enough times has us acting like a cult-member who watches the end-of-the-world square they have circled in their calendar get crossed out.

In the absence of what we pretend will arrive, we find resolve. We become even more certain than next time it will happen, and bring with it even more force than we thought the last time we sat around waiting for things to ignite.

Not only will inspiration show up, but it will prove me a genius!

We might not say or even think such things, but it’s in there, somewhere. It’s too richly weaved into the culture of being creative for us to pretend it isn’t part of who we are.

Hell, it’s probably why most of were drawn to creative work in the first place. Not in the hope of being seen as a creative genius, but to be touched by genius, for just a moment.

More Than Apples

The Inspiration Myth devalues the effort and skill required to do our work, to make the genuine, powerful, awe-inspiring moments of inspiration that sometime spark, worth anything.

Inspiration isn’t enough.

We can show our clients, friends, and family our process and how much work is involved. It might temper their notions of the value of their genius and our own. Or they’ll think we just over-complicate the issue and genius is genius and you either have it or you don’t, and if we have to work so hard for it, then maybe we don’t.

To avoid the same faults, we have to remember that the inspired idea isn’t enough, no matter how many apps we have installed and how well we can use them.

The inspired idea isn’t enough, even if we’ve worked through hundreds like it before.

Even if it’s enough some times, it can never be replied upon to be so every time.

If we rely on it too heavily, then those “creative but don’t know how to use an ‘Adobe’” clients we have are right – we’re nothing more than button pressers that get sparked from time to time.

It’s better to work than to be inspired. It’s better to get things done, to understand problems well enough that when inspiration arrives, it’s a nicety.

Inspiration, even when it does its job perfectly, cannot be considered a requirement of creative work.

It’s worth thinking about the time spent waiting for inspiration. What if it were spent honing one’s craft instead?

Wouldn’t it be worth spending the time understanding the inner workings of the problems before us, so that the solutions we land on are so valuable in their effectiveness that they far outweigh anything that might spring from an “inspired” mind?

Wouldn’t it be worth understanding the problem well enough so that an apple falling to the ground isn’t just an apple falling to the ground?

The post How The Inspiration Myth Devalues Our Craft first appeared on Retinart.

Spending too long sitting around, drinking in our own creative genius, waiting for inspiration to arrive.

Every creative industry probably has its own legends of divine inspiration – physicists have Newton’s apple, us designers have Scher’s Citibank logo.

Such mythology causes us to don a caricatured mask, giving us a warped view of what and how a designer does what they do.

This masks confuses us – has us think that out there in the ether is a beautifully wrapped idea, waiting to be placed gently in our laps. We pretend that work isn’t needed, that we’re creative—creative damn it—and ideas will spring forth for us, not us for them.

So we do nothing but wait. We wait for something unreliable, often misleading, and usually kind of meaningless. We wait for half-finished ideas that need to be massaged, or even worse, ideas that serve as distraction from the problems we actually have to solve.

The scariest thing about wanting to be inspired like this, to be gifted a moment of genius, is that we often do so to simply be distracted from something we don’t understand.

In having our attention inspired down the wrong line, we not only lose the opportunity to understand the problem at hand, we give up any hope of finding a unique solution.

The search for inspiration turns into a depthless hole into which we throw time and energy, not doing what we can actually do in the hope of not having to do what we can.

Inspiration Lets Us Escape

Inspiration is damn sexy. It’s a beautiful thing, teasing our attention with a light touch to the arm and a whisper so heard it’s barely a hush.

In the moment we’re so drunk on its attention that we think following it out of the room is the best thing to do.

Have you ever noticed how often you’re “inspired” by a great idea when you’ve got a hard problem to solve?

And the problem we’re often charmed to tends to be an easy one. A quick-win problem, one hardly, if at all, related to what we’re working on.

As the new problem starts to come into focus, what once seemed simple starts to become complicated. Our beautiful and charming easy problem is now ugly and difficult.

“Hearing about other people’s success isn’t the same thing as creating your own.”

James Clear

We get confused by chasing a win, rather than chasing understanding, that we suddenly find ourselves thinking about problems we assume we’ll have an easy time solving.

Then our focus is either split between two problems, or worse, we’ve abandoned the old one completely. Any energy and effort we’re able to put into solving any problem quickly diminishes below anything usable.

While we might wear the mask of a caricatured creative, I think inspiration can sometimes wear one of hollow novelty.

We might be able to escape the hard problem in front of us with this distraction, but before long we end up in a worse hell than we started in.

We Lose So Much When We Search For Inspiration

But inspiration doesn’t always silk into the room. We’re often the one doing the chasing.

In doing so we lose a great deal.

The time lost in the chase is obvious enough, but it’s the time lost once we grab onto it that’s the most worrisome.

When we’re stuck, when we need inspiration the most, we get so high off the smallest hints of it. We’re eager to just get something done, and even if that something isn’t borne from the problems we’re trying to solve, we don’t care.

This happens within a project, too. Trouble typesetting the copy can suddenly turn into inspiration on how to design the landing page.

“Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration. They are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly.”

José Ortega y Gasset

With the loss of this time goes the space to clarify an idea.

Gaining any kind of deep understanding, especially around a tough problem for which we’re trying to find an answer, can be very hard work.

When we sit around and wait for inspiration, whether we’re looking for it or not, we lose energy and time to simply try things.

Time, energy, and the willingness to try are what feeds hard work, that thing that lets us actually solve the right problem in the right way.

Trying might be what we’re desperately wanting to escape from.

We’re hard-wired to escape failure, and that’s what trying often leads to. Understanding and knowledge is often found amongst a field of dead ideas, and that’s a place few people are willing to wad through the stench of.

So instead of being willing to start with the minor pain of not knowing something, of how to uniquely deal with the problem before us, we escape into what we do know – pretty, probably distracting enough, pictures.

Which is what most of us mean when we talk about “inspiration”. Beautiful, distracting, easy to appreciate, barely relatable, pretty pictures.

Which is a shame, because once we have enough understanding and knowledge, we can easily find the obvious solution, one that only makes perfect sense in retrospect. The kind of idea that looks as if it was conceived in minutes, but has a birth that demands hours.

Because it could have been a solution that was discovered through a deep understanding of client/problem, and solution/audience, it could be one tailored perfectly for each.

Worst is when we hope for inspiration half way through gaining this inspiration, when the smell becomes too much, and we just want to be whisked away.

In these moments, novelty masked inspiration can leave us stranded and undo hours of work, while creating a demand for hours more.

Sticking to the hard work, to understand what we must so we can create what is needed, then we can go about making something that is beautiful and effective in more than whatever surface aesthetic we can pinch while looking for “inspiration.”

Hard Work Beats Inspiration

Being inspired to jump off track, or trying to encourage its arrival is not a bad thing.

The spark of inspiration is one of the greatest joys of doing creative work.

But it’s concerning when we forget about the work part of creative work, and want to try and shortcut our way out of doing what has to be done, or avoid admitting to not knowing or understanding something.

In that, it boils down to being an ego-driven avoidance. We chase after creative genius instead of doing hard-turned-clever work.

Looking for this kind of inspiration normally leads us to browse through books, online galleries, and portfolios.

This trolling ends when we find the result of someone else’s efforts and think it a good enough solution to the problem we’re trying to solve and slap a bastardised version of it together as a solution.

When I think about the masters of our craft I can’t imagine them diving off of the project brief and straight into a mindless hunt for inspiration, let alone sitting around and waiting for it.

I picture them striving to understand the audience, as well as the solution to their problem the client has, and how to bridge the two.

I picture them working hard, learning and trying and failing and trying and sketching and trying, that before long the shape of that bridge is so clear in their minds they’ve just got to take a few easy steps.

What the maters of our craft know, and what the rest of us have to remind ourselves every time we’re stuck, is that work beats inspiration.

The post Why Inspiration Is A Myth (and What Beats it Every Time) first appeared on Retinart.

I think it’s the inverse.

It’s not that we don’t know what marks to make, it’s that we don’t know which marks to choose.

We make it our duty to look at the world and mentally collect source material, to note how a million problems can be solved, about the infinite combination of elements and principles that we have at our disposal.

We know that all the work we’ve loved started here, from nothing. We know the work that we loathe, the stuff the makes us cringe, did too. Without realising it, we bring the anxiety of these memories with us.

It’s all started here, and a part of us is reminded that the potential of this page is unlimited. We understand this blank page holds more potential than we could ever imagine.

So as we mull over where to start, self doubt creeps in, bringing with it paralysis. It reminds us that the wrong mark or idea can lead to work of not just insignificance, but utter dismay for all involved. It will be judged and might be executed.

So the problem doesn’t become making the first mark.

The problem is becoming comfortable with deciding which mark to make.

At least on the surface.

Filling Blank Pages

It’s counter intuitive, but the way we make our choice is by acknowledging all that we bring to the blank page.

Once we can see how full it really is, we can brush everything we find until our choices of what to leave on the page becomes obvious.

So maybe the best thing for us to do is to take a step back and see all the jars of potential marks and tools that are available to us.

The key is context. We must pick from the jars of marks that make the most sense for what we’re doing and who we’re doing it for.

Phew, that’s a mouthful. So let’s make it more obvious:
Draw the marks that make the most sense.

Let’s look at four of these jars and see how they help us figure out where to start.

What’s Yours

This is the jars you carry around with you from project to project.

With each new project you bring with you your own taste, and interpretation of theory. You bring with you the jobs you’ve done before – what’s worked for you and what hasn’t, what was exciting to pitch and what failed miserably.

There’s also your curiosities. Those little aesthetic and stylistic things that you see and wonder “How does that work? How can I pull that off?” Each job gives you the opportunity to explore these quirks of taste.

The only work you can make is your own, and in remembering this, the number of marks you can make become limited. While it’s true that every bit of design we’ve ever seen started on the blank page, we’re only capable of producing our work.

It’s a subtle shift, but in doing so it means the blank page isn’t open to all the possibilities that we’ve seen, but all the possibilities we are capable of, or more likely, interested in trying.

Looking at the your own jar is simply to show you that you aren’t truly starting from the nothingness you see on the page.

What The Client Gives You

Most designers are more comfortable tweaking an existing design. We get more practice moving, deleting, adding, and scaling existing elements than we do starting from nothing, so that isn’t much of a surprise.

Luckily every job brings with it a list of essentials for us to shuffle and tweak. Even if we might argue (charm) the client into removing these down the road, we have to have good reason for doing so, reasoning that is often realised through exploration.

We don’t have a blank page when there’s the need for a logo, some contact information, a call to action, the really awesome and totally welcome and not-at-all-a-little-insulting client sketches, and the features and design of the product.

Hell, they might even have brought with them some copy, some photos, some research.

There’s also a reasonable chance they already have a suite of colours and typefaces chosen for them for their brand, maybe even grid structures.

Or at the very least, if they have none of this in a formal way, they might have previously produced materials that you can echo in your own (a double win – it gives you something to start with, and even informal branding is branding – a huge plus for audience recognition) or evolve.

What the Audience Gives You

When it comes to the audience jar, it’s probably better to think of it as a filter. It’s the best way to help us make our options more obvious.

The audience gives you an awful lot. Researching who they are, what they like, what they expect, and what they will notice, very quickly narrows our options from infinite to barely a handful.

The audience will have their own visual language – what works for an audience mostly made up of teenage boys in high school isn’t likely to appeal to the thirty-four year old working mother of two.

What messages, images, colours, even typefaces, works for one group, any group, isn’t guaranteed to work for another.

The pain and problems they have, the relief they’re looking for, their budget, their free time, their wants are all going to be fairly unique to each of them.

All of this works together to help filter the type of messages delivered, and more importantly for us, how they’re delivered.

What Your Research Gives You

While you’ll do a bit of research in trying to understand the audience, there’s still a lot more that can be done.

Research can start with looking at the history of the client and their product. Or with the audience and how each has changed and interacted with each other over time.

It could mean carefully reading the brand guidelines (if they exist), advertising, websites, internal materials. Not just those that belong to the client, but also their competitors, their audience, their contemporaries.

You can investigate how colours are used, what typefaces are chosen, the language in the copy, the photography and illustrations.

And of course there’s the actual product itself.

If it’s a physical product then hold it, use it how it’s meant to be used. If it’s for a band, listen to their music. If it’s a bakery, eat their apple tea cakes.

If it’s a cafe, sit and observe how people come and go, what they talk about, how they talk to the staff and how the staff talks back, what they order, what the place smells and sounds like.

If it’s an app look at people’s faces as they poke around at it, ask them questions, understand what catches their eye and what doesn’t, what makes them happy and what frustrates them.

If it’s beautiful, then hire a good photographer; if it’s ugly hire an illustrator.

Research helps us refine our context by showing us what’s come before, what’s likely to come next, and how each helps tell the story of the product or service we’re designing for.

Full and Blank to Essential and Obvious

There’s at least thirty things here that (firstly) show you what you bring to a blank page, (secondly) what the client brings to the page, and (thirdly), how to filter all of that to end up with what will hopefully be an obvious, and interesting outcome.

Going through some of the above processes, collecting ideas as you do, goes a long way to making clear what choices you have before you.

There’s bound to be more jars we could come up with, but the point stands – the blank page only remains so until we come to it. Then it’s filled with options we can filter.

And hopefully, some of the things filtered out will be our anxiety, nerves, frustration, expectations, confusion; and what’s kept might be comfort, goals, design elements to work with, and visual languages to speak through.

The next time you start feeling uneasy at the sight of a blank page, remember how much is really there.

The post Never Be Worried About the Blank Page Again first appeared on Retinart.

I pushed around the elements of it, rearranging, shifting, squishing, moulding all its pieces, and wishing, more than anything else, wishing for it to become something beautiful.

I spent weeks hoping to find wherever this feeling I had was hiding. There was something here, something, something, something, something worth holding onto, there had to be, I was convinced of it. It had to be special because I needed it to be special.

I was stuck in a loop. I needed to turn it into what I was chasing because I’d spent so long chasing it. To admit that it was a bad, ugly, stupid idea would be to say that it couldn’t be special and to say it couldn’t be special would say I wasted my time.

So I held onto the grains of it longer than I should have, giving it more than it was worth.

Developers have ducks on their keyboards to explain their ideas to, to justify their ideas to, to step through problems with, to prove themselves to. These little ducks of theirs help them.

We should all be so lucky to have a little duck to tell us when the scents we’re sniffing after are heading in the wrong direction.

Oh this idea. I wanted so badly to make it beautiful that I convinced myself it would be. I wanted it so badly that I blinded myself, so as to not notice how horribly malformed it was. How I wish I had a little duck.

When you’re chasing an idea that is ugly, convincing yourself that there is beauty to be found, remember that sometimes ugly really is ugly.

You may say that it’s your role to find its beauty, that you have the means and the gumption to make it so, that it just needs time and your experience.

This is noble, and if you’re sure, then be sure.

Sometimes we get so fixated on the chase, we don’t realise our eyes have been shut for most of it.

The post Trying to Make Ugly Things Beautiful first appeared on Retinart.

At least we have to convince our selves of that. If we can’t see it, how is anyone we’re talking to going to?

But more often than not this talk of what’s special, of this brilliance, gets lost amongst deadlines and budgets, clients and copy.

But this brilliance, this something special, answers why we are doing what we are doing. It answers why the product is being promoted, why people should bother paying attention, why people should hand over their money at whatever URL or button we show them, why it will make their lives better.

“It makes their lives better because …”
“It relieves the suffering of … by …”
“It’s a lot of fun because …”
“It’s better than watching TV because …”
“It means something special because …”
“It helps with …”
“It’s brilliant because …”

If we can’t answer why a product we’re helping promote is brilliant, then how are we going to promote it?

This brilliance matters more than we’re often willing to admit.

It’s what sells products in spite of all the things we say matter. The website could be hard to use, the product ugly, the packaging frustrating to open, worse to discard. But if the product does what it’s meant to do well enough, none of what bothers us as designers bothers the audience.

But it can be hard to understand what makes a product great. It means asking questions and listening to answers, to translating pains had by the audience, by learning more about the client, about why they want to make what they’re making.

It also means getting out of the way. If we figure out what makes something great then the worst thing we can do is muss it up with our clever and fancy design stuff.

Which is a shame because we’re better at doing the fancy design stuff than we are at not doing it. So maybe we sometimes don’t want to know what’s great about a product because it means we’ll have to do less of the work we love. Maybe we’ll have to admit that what we do doesn’t matter as much as we sometimes pretend it does.

The idea of someone walking up to me while I’m working and asking what’s so great about the product I’ve been staring at, sketching grids around, typesetting letters for, commissioning photos of, terrifies me.

Not because it’s a question I don’t know the answer to. But because it’s question I should know the answer to.

The post Finding A Bit of Brilliance first appeared on Retinart.

Last week I wrote about what happens when you stop showing up and how quickly it can undo a lot of great work.

What I didn’t mention is that stopping is the fun part.

It’s easy and gives us a whole slew of immediate benefits – more time, more energy, less on the mind, the opportunity to go off and do whatever little things we’ve been labelling as “distractions.”

Any new project started will welcome and shield us from the one previously given up. We’ll hardly find distraction in the little cries begging us to get back to what we were doing, and before long they won’t be heard at all.

Yup, stopping can be a relief. It can be fun. It can be exciting.

At least relatively. Because what’s tough, what hurts, what will make us regret having ever stopped is starting again.

With some time, complacency morphs back into respect and appreciation for what we might have accomplished before we stopped.

In the previous post I wrote about bricks. While we’re working, that’s all we see in our hand, because we’re too close to see what they’re building up to.

But when we stop for a while, seeing the bricks becomes too difficult, and all that’s visible is a castle. A fortress.

Surrounding it will be fear instead of comfort; complex and impossible tasks instead of small decisions and routine.

We might remember how we did our work. We might remember portions of the processes. But those bricks will be damn heavy, hard to hold, and impossible to lay as squarely as all the other bricks we see, bricks we’ve laid before.

The loss of confidence and skill compounds. We have memory of being good at practicing, but the longer we’re away from our routine, what we’re capable of will wither.

If it were a chart, our skills, let’s say our “line of competency”, will go from a steady upward rise, to a dismal downward arc.

But we can put a stake in it. We can stop the line from arcing down further and hopefully start to push it back up again.

The Problem Isn’t Showing Up Again. It’s Showing Up Again and Again and Again and Again and …

The first time we start practicing a lost habit it’s easy to feel lost.

Wait, no. Lost is too kind a word.

It’s easy to feel like we’ve completely screwed everything up, that we won’t ever make it back to where we were, that we’re losers and fakers and phoneys and we don’t deserve to call ourselves designer or developer or writer.

I love the idea that angers grows from unmet expectations. We expect people to behave one way on the road, but then when that expectation is broken because someone cuts in front of us, we get angry.

I think what happens when we come back is much the same.

We have the expectation that our line of competency has stayed on the same path as when we stopped, and are then frustrated when our new efforts show that it’s heading down.

But there’s a few things we can do to make starting again not only easier, but exciting and motivating.

Don’t Expect Anything. Explore Instead

Don’t start making marks expecting anything.

We often go into practice expecting a certain result. It’s a toxic way to work, especially now. Because it will bring nothing but disappointment.

If our skill-set is exactly where we left off, we’ll be disappointed it isn’t higher. If it’s lower, we’re angry we didn’t stay where we are.

It’s better to explore. To start working and seeing what comes of it. It’s better to be pleasantly surprised by what is found than frustrated by what isn’t.

Enjoy The New Perspective

When walking old grounds anew, it’s easy to notice the landscape from a different perspective. What might once have looked a mountain will reveal itself as an anthill. What was once a dull paddock might now be a majestic field of rolling hills.

These 10,000ft views of your work and skill-set don’t come along often, so enjoy seeing how things were, and how they can be. Such perspective can help guide your craftsmanship for years to come.

It might even save us. We might notice that all our skill-building has been in a direction that you don’t actually want to go.

(It isn’t hard to start going down this path – a UI designer might want to learn a little Javascript to better talk to developer, as well as have an understanding of what’s possible. But before long their practice might have them shift from “good designer who knows a little code” to “crappy developer who knows a lot about design.”)

Start Small, Expect Less

If you wrote a thousand words a day, aim for a hundred. Or worry less about the edit and be happy with 2,000. If you were making leaps in understand a new programming language, look to become familiar with the fundamentals again.

There’s no point in being bothered by flat, boring, dull, even ugly design work, as long as it’s being made.

Worry that’s put into the quality of the result means a lot less than taking pride in the fact that there simply is a result.

Enjoy the small wins of having started again, of having made a small mark – at this point quantity triumphs over quality.

Start With One Thing

Almost any craft can be broken down into a bunch of smaller components.

Designers have to worry about grids, colours, imagery, call to actions, guiding the eye, balance, harmony, typography, and on and on and on. Most of those could be broken down again. Take typography for example – it turns into typeface selection, readability of body copy, balance of headlines, balance of text blocks, font size and weight.

We might remember those bricks we were laying as entire projects, but they’re not. They’re smaller than that. They might even be made up of a whole heap of bricks themselves.

So start small, as small as you can. It’s less to expect out of yourself – it’s a wonderful small win.

The designer might start by just trying to match two colours. Over, and over, and over. It’s a great way to collect small wins.

Start Small, Slow, and Enjoy the Small Wins

Trying to restart old habits, especially ones in which you’re going through the ups and downs of skill building, is rarely going to be fun.

But by lowering your expectations, exploring your options and methods, and starting with one small aspect of your previous routine, things can be a lot easier.

Doing so builds in very little pressure, which means you’ll approach your practice calmly, and enjoy watching the gears starting to move.

It won’t be long until a series of small wins will start building momentum, and before you know it you’ll be building your castle again.

The post How To Restart A Creative Habit first appeared on Retinart.

Our efforts compound.

The value plucked from the hundredth day working is greater than that from the first. What once seemed unimaginable seems obvious as you gain a better understanding of subtleties the amateur simply cannot see.

We give up time with friends or family, we horde books and movies and albums we hope to get to one day, we ignore the exploration of some skills in the hope of gaining mastery over others. We ignore the monochrome world-at-large in favour of the Technicolor dream going on inside our heads.

And any pains caused by such abstinence is quickly zapped from our memories when we get a hint of what we will become.

Even a few days of work gives us growth. Which is great! We deserve a break, no? We are better than we were before, and today we’re tired, and there’s a great movie on tonight, and there’s that other project we want to work on, so why not just stop? Why shouldn’t we stop? Just for a couple of days?

What’s the worst that could happen?

When Nothing Happens

There’s no reason not to feel great about any accomplishment you have as you hone your craft. But it’s a slippery slope.

Suddenly pride can turn to complacency, and we think what we’ve done as being fairly … mundane. After all, who are we? We’ve just been doing small things, and we just happened to do them for a long time.

This complacency stops us from recognising what we’ve accomplished.

When you spend so much time looking down at what’s in front of you, you don’t realise that the bricks you’ve been laying have built a castle.

A writer might write a couple hundred words a day, but given enough time it becomes a book. A designer might just be trying to figure out how to give harmony to image and type, but, sure enough, eventually they’re able to evoke emotion and drive action. The developer might just be trying to solve small curiosities, but they add up to apps and platforms that change lives.

Complacency doesn’t allow us to see all that. Complacency stops us from sticking to our habits. From seeing that what we’re doing is important, even if it’s only important to us. It stops us from seeing where we’re going, even if it’s obvious.

Complacency doesn’t let us see our magnificent castle.

It only allows us to see a pile of bricks.

Then something horrible happens — the effort put in seems meaningless (because it looks easy), and the outcome pointless (because it’s just a few bricks).

So who cares if we stop for a few days.

The Moment We Stop

We lose so much by stopping.

We lose the habit of showing up, the one thing that ensures that any effort is to be made.

We lose momentum, that magnificent element of learning that means tomorrow will be worth more than today, that the whole of our efforts is greater than the sum.

Building habits is never easy, but maintaining them is. Once we’re past the initial hump of 60-90 days of showing up, doing so becomes automatic. Our days feel empty and unfinished unless we lay a brick or two.

And momentum isn’t even noticeable until you don’t have it. Unless you’re making sure to count your bricks daily, you won’t notice that you’re building a rhythm, and are slowly laying more and more every time your now-natural habit has you show up.

Both become regular, and regular means boring, and boring gives us a misconception of value.

Best of all, this boring couple open you up to the opportunity to grab onto moments of exponential growth.

Those moments in which you’re not just in the flow of our work, but you’re seeing a balance to the myriad of ideas you’re trying to hold onto.

Those moments when you make a comment on Twitter and it’s caught by someone you admire, someone you can learn from.

Those moments when your mind is so entrenched in your craft that even waiting in line to buy eggs means you’re solving problems.

Those moments when what were once mountains and dips on the path to mastery turn into milestones and opportunities.

Those moments that can’t be forced, or instantly gained.

Those moments that are our rewards for showing up regularly and doing work we care about.

What Could A Few Days Hurt?

The next time you’re tired, or disorganised, or uninspired, or just too busy, ask yourself “What harm could skipping it really do?”

But make sure you get the inflection right. We always ask that question of ourselves with the unspoken answer of “none! ha-haaa!”

Really ask it. Really wonder what harm could be done.

For me it was losing a writing habit. I haven’t written regularly in four months, or published in about two.

For me it wasn’t losing a writing habit. I haven’t written regularly for five months, nor publish in about three. That hurts. Deeply. But the harm done is far worse.

I haven’t shown up. I haven’t continued to have with you this conversation about craft and building skill and getting better.

I’m sorry about that.

I fooled myself into thinking that because I was working on something important (I was, I swear) like a major revision to the design of Retinart, that it was ok to stop. My complacency had me think that planning content for you was as good as writing content for you.

It was only meant to be for a couple of weeks. Just long enough for me to focus. I thought it would be easy to start again. To come back and write a post a week. It was just a brick? What of it, a brick is a brick is a brick, and I was once able to mortar one in place in barely a couple hours if needed.

Now all I see is a castle.

Don’t make my mistake.

Don’t take for granted those bricks in your hand.

The post The Horrible Moment When We Stop first appeared on Retinart.

It was just a mole removal.

On my head. Scalp. Barely any meat, mostly skin and bone.

It hurt, but only for a day or two.

Then the pathology results told us it wasn’t all gone. We had to go back again, cutting over the barely-healed scar tissue to take a bigger chunk of not-much-meat.

That one hurt. It shouldn’t have, but it did.

So I could barely work on what mattered for about a week.

Then I got the flu.

Then our son got the flu. He has it, right now, in the next room. It’s 5am and my not-yet-three son is awake, eating cheese and crackers, watching Curious George from his mother’s warm and worried embrace.

We hope it’s the flu. Who knows? He could be better tomorrow, or he could be very ill for his birthday ten days away.

He’s cute when he’s sick. I hate when he’s sick. I worry about him, and can barely focus.

We get worried because he had the flu once. But we were wrong. And then he had convulsions and we ended up in the ER twice in less than a day.

I sat at my desk knowing what I was going to do that morning. It was going to be a good morning. Then a client called and it was no longer going to be a good morning.

They’d gotten something for a major event wrong. It was in two days. The program had been printed, and there were currently two thousand copies of it in her office. Two thousand mistakes.

By the time we’d figured out what to do, the morning was gone, and so too was any plan I had. It knocked the rest of my day around so badly that not much of value was achieved.

A whole day, gone.

It could happen again today. I have two hours until I walk into the office, and a lot can go wrong in two hours, especially with a sick kid. Though it sounds like he’s starting to explain every scene of his movie to my wife. So he might be ok.

But who knows. So I write now.

We can’t say what’s going to happen tomorrow.

We’re kind of wonderful in that we always hope for it to be good.

“I’ll do it tomorrow,” is as wonderful as it is awful.

On the one hand it means we aren’t doing something today, even though we probably could, and maybe should. On the other hand, it’s our way of saying “tomorrow is going to be a good day, nothing unexpected will happen.”

That’s pretty wonderful.

But we hope for that, we don’t promise it.

Do you know what will happen tomorrow?

Do you know if you’ll be sick for a month this year?

Do you know if something will happen in your family?

Do you know if all your projects will go perfectly well, without any need for a last minute change? Or a scared client? Or an angry client?

Do you know that you’ll remain inspired? Do you know that you’ll remain energetic, that you’ll be able to find all that you need so that you can create the images in your head, so you can solve the problems at your finger tips?

Do you know, for sure, that there won’t be another interesting project you want to work on come up? One so exciting and career-changing that to pass it up would be a mistake?

Are you ready for it? Have you done the work now to be ready for it later? Or have you kept telling yourself that you’ll get to it tomorrow, when everything will be perfect?

The best way to prepare for the unknown is to do the best you can now.

Don’t waste time worrying about making sure conditions are perfect for getting work done. Worry about when the conditions will be so bad that you won’t be able to do anything at all.

I can hear Spanish movie trailers coming from our son’s iPad. I think he’s going to be ok. But who knows? So I’m going to go give him a hug.

We’re clever, so we figure out ways around ourselves.

So we have to be better than clever. Smarter than clever.

Doing the smart thing isn’t always the easy or pain-free thing.

Sometimes the smart thing just hurts.

And sometimes that pain is a small price.

The post Plan For Who Knows first appeared on Retinart.

Which is nuts, because we’re both in-house creatives at the same business, so you’d think we would have had the same experiences.

And boy have I had some bad clients.

Our work is different, and people come to us for different things. But it still often feels like there’s a pandemic of bad clients floating around one end of the hallway, while there’s rarely a stray to be spotted at the other.

I’ve been working with her on several projects over the last year or so and have started to understand one of the biggest reasons why her clients love working with her.

She emails them.

A lot.

At first I almost couldn’t believe how often. After every meeting, even internal ones, and any time a slight change of direction was taken, whenever there was a sketch or a tiny part of a job was done.

At least that’s how it seemed to me. For her, it was whenever there was a strategic change or development. And she was right.

“They rarely understand what’s going on with their projects, what we do, or how long it takes, so I like to keep them up to date. It means there aren’t any surprises for them, and I’m sure they’re happy with the direction I’m taking.”

It’s natural for us to take for granted that the simple things we understand might be complex for other people. We do this everyday, so much of it seems obvious.

But for the client? They are in another office somewhere, probably clicking “Send/Receive” in their inbox a few times a day hoping to get a glimpse of what’s going on with an idea they’ve given to someone else to make real.

It’s only a small thing, but I’m amazed at the reward it offers.

I still hate dealing with email, but I’ve been trying this with a few clients and the difference in attitude, respect, and happiness has been noticeable.

The post A Little Email Is A Big Thing first appeared on Retinart.