Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All — https://www.ideo.com/people/tom-kelley

By Charlesmudy

As a newbie designer, its quite hard to stay up-to date with trends and current design patterns. Not only that but you also need to keep your creativity intact with the trends, so that got us thinking on how creative designers go about finding new ideas, new ways to design, creating unique concepts, forming a different approach to solving problems and even tools that makes their work effective and creative. We realized, there is no single formula, it all boils down to doing certain things which we will discuss as you read along.

When you’re just starting out, its no doubt that you will struggle to find creative ideas and without this, your work becomes blank with no uniqueness in your design. Don’t worry, this is totally natural. There are couple of ways to improve your creative design thinking, it will obviously work differently for different people — so follow which one works best for you.

Steal:

Truth be told, everything in life comes from experience and there is no fast way to achieve this. You need to copy and steal from designs that inspire you, this trains your brain to start thinking on this direction. Of course, you shouldn’t blatantly use everything from someone else’s work, you sure need to add your own creativity and tweak to it. After a certain period of time, you will start to see hidden patterns in the way some of those designers arrive to their solution.

The more you do this, the more your creativity starts to build up and slowly find your own design thinking and concepts that helps you arrive at a solution.

Follow inspirational blogs and websites:

This is no-brainer, without constantly getting inspirations, you cannot progress with your creative thinking. Getting inspired comes from different sources which provides you with different insights, approaches and methods used by other creatives and top designers.

Some of the resources to follow:

There are more but sometimes following too many resources can get you distracted, so keeping your resources as few as possible is a good start.

Consistent practicing:

Sketch design for side project — ProposeDesign

Well, whats the value of reading without putting it into practice huh? To harness all what we have mentioned above, you need to put it all into constant practice, work relentlessly to become better as a designer. No one can magically put ideas and creativity in you, you certainly need to put an effort from your side and that is by practicing.

All in all, getting better at anything takes time and you don’t need to pressure yourself in any way. Slowly but surely you will get better.

Thank you!

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