Avoiding Creative Burnout
We’ve all heard of it and many of us have experienced it. But how can we get ourselves out of that rut and how can we prevent it from happening?
We’ve compiled a few of our top tips for avoiding creative burnout and keeping the creativity flowing.
1. Stay Creative With Passion Projects
This may not be a groundbreaking piece of advice but one of the best ways to exercise your creativity is to work on a personal project. It’s a great way for you to let your creativity run wild and have some fun with design without the restrictions of a real client brief.
If you’re struggling to think of a project to work on or lacking some inspiration there’s a bunch of brief generators out there to help.
Goodbrief is a random generator – you can select the type of design you would like to experiment with from logo and branding to web and advertising. It will then produce you your very own design brief including client details.
Another wonderful generator is Briefz – it ‘spits out ideas for creative design projects’. It’s completely random with a new brief with every click. If the briefs aren’t quite what you’re looking for, it’s always a good place to start if you need some inspiration.
2. Hit Restart
We’re creatures of habit – we can fall into the comfort of a familiar routine and sometimes get stuck.
We often do the same things day after day in terms of our creative process. We follow similar processes for each project we have, utilising the same tools or techniques. Now we’re not saying you need to forget everything you know about design to get yourself out of your creative funk but it can be beneficial to shake things up in your routine. You can start by simply changing your creative process. Try an unfamiliar tool or experimenting with a new technique – it allows you to see things from a new perspective.
3. Get Inspired
Similarly to refreshing our routine, we sometimes need a reboot of our inspiration. Here’s a couple of websites full to the brim with inspiring work.
‘It’s Nice That‘ “championing creativity since 2007” is a network featuring a whole heap of brilliance for designers. Sharing creative work from individuals and agencies alike. A personal highlight of the website for us is their ‘Best of the Month’ where they share their favourite pieces of design each month.
‘Short of the Week‘ – here’s the perfect site for when you need a little pick-me-up or a quick burst of inspiration. As the site name may give away, they regularly share filmmakers short videos. They share a range of video production techniques featuring different channels covering animation, comedy, documentary, drama and sci-fi. Their animation section is varied and because of their carefully curated site you can rest assured you will find some form of inspiration in the diversity of the storytelling techniques.
4. Get Away From It
This is our final tip for getting out of the creative dump we have all found ourselves in at some point. Get away from it, get away from that project that’s driving you mad or the piece of work that you can’t quite put your finger on yet. Sometimes you just need to take a break and come back with a fresh set of eyes and a new outlook for it to work.
Get out and about, we previously mentioned specific websites for inspiration but you can be inspired anywhere, and often the best ideas come to you when you least expect them too.
