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Creativity Is a Muscle. Here’s How to Train It.
Most designers think creativity is something you either have or you don’t. It’s not.
Creativity isn’t a talent. It’s not something you’re either born with or forever without. It’s a skill, and more specifically, it’s a practice of pattern-breaking. The real reason most designers hit a creative rut isn’t that their ideas have run dry. It’s that they keep pulling from the same well, using the same moves, falling back on what worked before.
I’ve been designing for almost three decades, and these are the practices that have actually helped me push my own creativity when it started to stall. The goal isn’t to be more creative in some abstract sense. The goal is to break out of your own habits long enough to see what’s actually possible for this brief, this problem, this moment. Here are eight ways to do that.
1. Brain dump everything first
Before you touch any design tools, open a blank document and just start typing. Every angle, every preconceived notion, every association you have with the subject. Get it all out. Don’t filter it. Don’t organize it. Just let it flow. The act of getting everything out of your head and onto the page clears space for better thinking, and often the simple act of writing things down starts connecting ideas you wouldn’t have found otherwise. This is usually the first thing I do when I start a new project.
2. Make a long list of every obvious idea
Once you’ve done your brain dump, make a long list of every idea you can think of for the brief. Say you’re designing a logo for a pet store. The first few ideas will be the obvious ones: a dog, a cat, a bone, a paw print, a doghouse. Keep going. The next batch will be things that feel adjacent, like a leash, a food bowl, a collar. Keep going. Eventually you’ll start reaching into stranger territory: a kid’s drawing of their first pet, the shape of an animal curled up sleeping, the feeling of walking into a store that smells like cedar and kibble.
That’s where it gets interesting. The first ten or fifteen ideas on your list are the ones every other designer would come up with too, and that’s exactly why you want to get through them. What’s waiting on the other side is something much more personal: your own references, your way of seeing things, the specific details only you would notice. That’s where the character of the work comes from, but you can only get there once you’ve cleared out the obvious stuff sitting in the way.
3. Pen and paper, doodle
Digital tools are rigid in ways we’ve stopped noticing. When you brainstorm in Illustrator, you’re already working with boxes, grids, font choices, and consistent stroke weights. The tool is quietly making decisions for you before you’ve made any decisions yourself. Pen and paper has none of that. It’s just thought on a surface, and you can follow it anywhere without the software nudging you back toward something tidy. Let your brain move freely before you ask your hands to make it neat.
4. Throw away the first idea
Humans share a kind of visual and cultural shorthand, and when you’re handed a brief, your brain reaches for it automatically. Say “truck” to a room full of people and almost everyone pictures the same thing. Ask a dozen designers to create a logo for a dentist and the first sketch from every one of them will involve a tooth. That’s not a failure of imagination. That’s just the shared language we all carry around. The problem is that the shared language produces shared, forgettable work. Your first idea is almost always the obvious one, and it’s worth recognizing it as such, setting it aside, and seeing what comes next.
5. Create two, three, or even four directions at the same time
One of the most effective things I’ve ever done to break my own patterns is working on two, three, sometimes four completely different versions of something at the same time. Not variations of the same concept, but genuinely different directions: one dark with a top nav, one light with a side nav, one editorial and minimal, one bold and expressive. The way I do it is by literally switching between apps or tabs or canvases every ten to fifteen minutes. You design on one for a bit, then switch to another and push that in a completely different direction, then switch back. You’re not finishing one and then starting the other. You’re actively stretching your brain across multiple ideas at once, which forces you to keep them distinct from each other. When you work this way, you can’t default to your usual style because you’re constantly having to make choices that push the designs apart. Somewhere in that friction you usually find something worth keeping.
6. Borrow from another industry
Ask yourself what it would look like if a completely different kind of company made this thing. What if Nike designed this hardware product? What if a luxury fashion brand built this app? Your industry has its own visual conventions and unwritten rules about what things should look like, and most designers working in that space are following the same conventions whether they realize it or not. Borrowing from another world entirely lets you bring in references and energy that feel fresh precisely because they’re out of place.
7. Force yourself to get weird
Think about Liquid Death. Someone pitched the idea of selling water in a tallboy can with a death metal skull on it, and on paper that sounds like the kind of thing that gets laughed out of the room. But they committed to the weirdness, explored it seriously, and built one of the most talked-about brands in the category. The point isn’t that every idea needs to be that extreme. The point is that it’s much easier to pull something back from too weird to just right than it is to push something boring toward interesting. Start strange and calibrate from there. The toned-down version of a genuinely weird idea is almost always more interesting than the polished version of a safe one.
The other half of getting weird is learning to recognize when something has a spark. When you’re riffing and throwing ideas around, sometimes one of them gives you a little jolt, a tiny thread of something that feels like it has promise even if you can’t explain why yet. Most people kill those sparks immediately because the idea seems too strange or too half-formed to take seriously. Don’t do that. When you feel that flicker of excitement, hang on to it and try to figure out what’s actually pulling you in. Why does it excite you? What’s the thread worth following? Some of the best creative work starts as a weird little spark that someone had the instinct to nurture instead of dismiss.
8. Focus on empathy and emotion
Design work can get very cerebral very quickly. You’re deep in the brief, thinking about demographics, user flows, best practices, brand guidelines. All of that is useful, but it’s easy to lose the thread of what the thing is actually supposed to feel like. Stripping away the logistics for a moment and just thinking about emotion can be a powerful way to reset.
I remember working on a website for a music artist, and somewhere in the early conversations we stopped asking “how do we promote her new album” and started asking “how do we get people to fall in love with her?” That one question completely changed the direction. We weren’t designing a promotional site anymore. We were designing an experience where someone could feel genuinely connected to this person. The brief was the same, but the emotional goal was different, and it opened up a whole set of creative decisions that we wouldn’t have found if we’d stayed in the logistics.
Connection is almost always the real goal underneath the brief, and it’s worth finding it before you start designing.
Train the muscle, and the ideas will follow
A lot of designers go straight from the creative brief into the design tool, and sometimes that works fine. You know the problem, you have a feel for the direction, and the work just flows. But if you find yourself getting stuck, recycling the same moves, or landing on something that feels safe but not exciting, it’s usually because you’ve condensed the process and skipped the exploration. You went straight to building before you gave yourself room to think.
That’s what these practices are for. They’re not a rigid checklist you need to follow every time. They’re ways to open up space when the work starts to feel narrow. Creativity isn’t something you sit around waiting to feel. It’s something you build by doing the work of pushing past what comes easily, and the more you practice that, the stronger the muscle gets.
