Practice Messy. Present Clean.

A method to your design madness…

“What does your artboard look like?”

That’s a question I asked an up-and-coming designer in one of our recent graphic design portfolio reviews. I wanted him to show his raw work to better understand his creative process.

Your initial design ideas should look like chaos. Okay, maybe not chaos. But it should be messy. It should be filled with ideas. It should be multiple artboards. And it doesn’t need to be organized or logical or pretty. At least, not at first.

Some designers (and creators, in general) get tripped up, frustrated, and stuck when creating ideas because they are thinking too hard. They are trying to be perfect. They expect to lovingly lock eyes with the computer screen, crack their knuckles, and create an exceptional, buttoned-up masterpiece on their first try.

️ Newsflash: That’s not how design works.

️When the perfect design doesn’t happen, you might tinker with the same idea: moving this pixel, nudging that one, deleting an element, and altering the font of a line of text so many times that it all starts to look the same.

This is exactly how you enter the Black Hole of Design Un-Productivity
[insert Twilight Zone music here].