Creative confidence and better inspiration for product designers
Premise
For the past two years I have been a ‘Helper’ in a design community that helps junior product designers create their first portfolio, get that first design job, or navigate the harsh seas of design positions.
Listening to hundreds of designers speak their minds and ask questions, I have come to notice some mental and knowledge gap patterns that I believe designers should nurture early on in order to grow as professionals. In this piece, I will map those gaps, and explain why I believe it’s important to understand and train those values early on.
As with anything else I write, It is solely my opinion, and I urge you to explore more opinions and only then decide what feels like the right value or principle to take with you moving forward in design.
Creative confidence
“The courage to be creative and to keep being creative through successes and setbacks. Confidence is the factor that supports and furthers creative thought and helps turn ideas into reality. It’s key to every successful design process”
There’s a lot of reading material online about Creative confidence, a huge part of it is attributed to IDEO, and I’ll leave some useful links here for further reading, but put simply, Creative confidence is the same as ordinary confidence — the freedom to be yourself even if the outside says otherwise. Designers need to develop creative confidence early on because it’s the armor that will lead them to the promised land — Their own creative style. Their “thing”, their “repertoire”. If you do not develop creative confidence, you will not be able to show yourself completely and stand out, or find your voice in design.
Any daily decision, from the base color or input field type, your experience approach to a problem, or the solution to the entire project will require some creative confidence. The best products are confident products, they are proud of what they offer, and they display that proudly. Whether you decided to design in the most common manner or decided to explore a completely new solution, one that is unique to that industry and project type, do it with confidence and let your intuition slowly take more control of the project at hand.
A good out-of-the-box example of this is Francesca Woodman — a photographer with a unique and confident style that is still considered extraordinary long after her passing.
Why you need to build creative confidence:
Handling criticism better — When you have an inner creative confidence mechanism, you are able to both handle criticism and move on faster and better, but also to learn how to use criticism in a manner that fits you. Sometimes you filter it, and sometimes you accept it. Having no confidence will make criticism seem like a burden, missing the compass that can state “Thanks, I needed that, some I will use and some is not relevant to where I am heading with this”. Any wind (critic) is favorable (act on it) if you have no destination (creative confidence), so build that compass.
Finding a type of work you can enjoy even if it’s complex and difficult— Assuming you started somewhere in your 20s, you are about to embark on 20+ years in design or design-related roles. That’s a lot of time, and there are a lot of industries, project types, companies, products, and design culture types. Which one to choose? Well, you can use ‘trial and error’ for years and years, or you can spend more energy on developing that inner voice that looks a single day in and out and can tell you, “This I enjoy, and this not so much”. It’s easier to experience hardships and challenges when you feel motivated to solve them for more than a paycheck. But in order to know what that role looks like, you have to understand what you look like (creatively speaking).
Standing out — Early on in your career, before your Linkedin looks like a factory of competence and experience, you will start in a large pool of juniors, all looking for the same first job. I have reviewed hundreds of portfolios for the past two years and the majority of them look exactly the same. This is natural and is OK, BUT. If you want to stand out in a pile of first portfolios and design projects, develop a professional tone and voice (creative) and polish your way of communicating it well (confidence). This investment will pay off.
Principles to understand in order to develop Creative confidence:
Get comfortable not knowing the answers (or, not using the first thing that comes to mind) — as a general tone, rushing to solutions straight after discovering a problem will make you fast, but probably not very innovative early on. Practice feeling comfortable with saying “I don’t know, but I’ll find out”. This will grow a muscle much needed to explore who you are as a designer and will also help navigate tough work environments. Marty Neumeier puts it well — go from “knowing and doing”, to “knowing, making, and doing”.
Learn to be ok with some professional loneliness — It’s natural to acquire friends who are also designers or follow other designers online but keep in mind that common interests do not necessarily mean common taste (visually or as an approach to solving problems) and you might drift apart from their opinions, that’s completely natural and actually might involve some personal development.
Learn to let go (of control, of how things should go, of your own head and patterns)- Who’s the best designer in the world? what’s the best approach to designing things? to build things? no one knows, and it doesn’t really matter. Cool down. If something feels right, it might be a good path to follow, even if it doesn’t look like what the Google book offers as a way to make this. The fact is that there isn’t a single path to creating amazing things. Some ideas were the result of years of small well-researched steps, and some amazing things were a product of a few playful nights on a computer. Forget the path, and learn to carve your own roads.
Experiment and experiment again- The same methods might only sometimes open new doors. Try again. Make 5 iterations. Try 3 more approaches to that flow. Test 20 more fonts for that project. make something and then make it completely differently. Try new methods, new materials, new mediums, and sometimes try nothing. No, two is not enough, have five. Work on that muscle that lets go (emotionally and professionally) from the hard work you put into something and get comfortable saying “Let’s try something else”.
