Creativity is a muscle. Here's how to train it.
Eight practices that have helped me push past my own defaults after almost three decades of design work.
Creativity Is a Muscle. Here’s How to Train It.
Creativity isn’t a talent. It’s a practice of pattern-breaking. Most designers in a rut aren’t out of ideas. They’re stuck 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 past my own defaults. Here are eight ways to train the muscle.
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. 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.
2. Make a long list of every obvious idea.
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.
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.
4. Throw away the first idea.
Everyone who hears “dentist logo” pictures a tooth. That’s not a failure of imagination. That’s the shared cultural shorthand we all carry. 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.
Work on genuinely different directions at once, not variations of the same concept. One dark with a top nav, one light with a side nav, one editorial and minimal, one bold and expressive. Switch between them every ten to fifteen minutes. 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.
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, and most designers working in that space are following them 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. On paper, 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. It’s much easier to pull something back from too weird to just right than it is to push something boring toward interesting. 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. 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. 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. 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. Connection is almost always the real goal underneath the brief, and it’s worth finding it before you start designing.
A lot of designers go straight from the creative brief into the design tool, and sometimes that works fine. 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.
These practices aren’t a rigid checklist. 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.
What’s your go-to move when you’re creatively stuck? Hit reply. I’m always looking for new ones.
-K
P.S. Read the full post on Thriveful for more detail on each of these practices.
P.P.S. If you want to push your portfolio further with real feedback from experienced creatives, check out Thriveful’s Portfolio Bootcamp. It’s the kind of structured critique that actually moves the needle.