4 ways to never have a creativity block

Ah! The dreaded creativity block! There is an impending project deadline, and we keep staring at a Figma frame, wondering how to fix this and bring out the oomph.

Here are four ways to circumvent that.

1. There is no blank canvas, only a blank sketchbook

Let's try a scenario. You are a talented artist, and I ask you to draw a few sketches of a castle in the sky being attacked by cloud monsters. You have, like, a day for it. Go!

Does that sound unreasonable? Yet, this is a day in the life of a concept artist in top animation studios who constantly churns out ideas as thumbnail sketches. If you start your research after the project starts, you are already too late.

Feng Zhu, the legendary concept artist and the founder of FZDSchool, highlights the idea of a visual library as a conscious effort to understand and assimilate the world around us captured in a sketchbook, which inherently translates to art. If I have to apply that to UX Design, for example, I would be better equipped to come up with rapid prototypes of the solution I am working on if I had already built a visual library based on design trends, competitor analysis, and the existing experience of top apps like JIRA, Uber, etc.

2. Notes made today are the Lego blocks to an art piece built tomorrow

Francis Ford Coppola famously created exceedingly detailed notes on Mario Puzo's Godfather while reading through the book. The notes alone could suffice as a script for the movie.

If you go down the rabbit hole, enough blogs and productivity experts are highlighting the importance of note-making and how it can be used to find unique connections in the future to "manufacture creativity." But the gist is very simple.

Keeping distilled notes/highlights of information consumed adds a personal perspective to the world around us, thus creating unique creative solutions to problems only we can produce.

I highly recommend Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain for this.

3. Quantity over quality.

Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions - Ira Glass

When it comes to sharpening our tools, more is actually more. Designers, especially those in the early stages of their careers, tend to fall into the trap of perfecting before the big presentation. Creativity rarely exists as a one-off. Many times, bespoke art would have been built on piles of canvas that never saw the light of the day but needed to be done to reach there.

4. Go easy on yourself.

Fear is what blocks an artist. The fear of not being good enough. The fear of not finishing. The fear of failure and of success. The fear of beginning at all. There is only one cure for fear. That cure is love. - Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

Sometimes, the best way to overcome a creativity block is to go easy on yourself. It is okay not to be at the best. It is okay to ask friends and colleagues for help and receive their perspectives. We are conditioned in many ways to be a certain way or to perform at a certain level. But what makes us all incredibly creative humans is the flaws that come with it.