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Avoid Creative Burnout

Posted in:design, pattern, play, type, work at about 9am

This December I graduated from college. After graduation, I started working a basically normal work week—40 hours. That is 40 hours of web design per week. While I love it, I have found that much focused time on doing one sort of creative task can be quite taxing on me mentally and creatively. After a month or two of working, I just found myself repulsed by web design. And by repulsed, I mean it made my head hurt to look at websites (and I’m not kidding).

When I was in school, there were semesters when I was taking 3+ studio classes which means I was in the studio working 20 or more hours a week. That was on top of other homework, 15 hours of work, tutoring in a writing workshop, directing design for an online publication, and other extra-curriculars. I was much busier then, but I didn’t feel burnt out, in fact, that was one of the more productive times in my life. So, I wondered, what’s different now?

Well, this realization wasn’t as concise and clean as I’m putting it here, but I came to believe the difference is that in school I was involved in a lot of things, but there was a lot of variation. Now, there is little variation so it’s easy to really get sick of what I’m doing.

So, a month or so ago, realizing this, I started being intentional about keeping my creative output varied. I have tried a few things I’ll show you, but I think part of the success is changing it up it all the time. So, I started with sketching more and I’m moving into some other areas now.

Hand Lettering

My first attempt at this was to start doing some hand lettering. I’m pretty horrible at it, but this has helped a LOT in facilitating creativity. I find just doing something that requires me to think in a way very different from how I think about web design has really kind of freed my mind. Here’s some of what I’ve come up with:

Type Play

The other thing I’ve been doing is taking two things I love—type and patterns—and playing with them in fun ways. My first attempt, I just took a lower case ‘r’ and started playing with it. I began with altering the letter-form slightly. Then, from there, i just started repeating and overlapping it and making some cool images. Here’s what I came up with:

This discipline of creativity, a few weeks after starting it, I have found has been very productive. I have much better ideas now than I’ve had for a while and I enjoy my work instead of it giving me a headache. I suggest it. If you have other ideas as to how to help overcome burnout, let me know. I’m interested in what others are doing.