I saw a post on Threads today from lettering artist Simon Walker that pretty much sums up the creative process much of the time:
DM: Hey I love your work what’s your process?
Me: Staring unblinkingly at the screen while drawing and redrawing and zooming in and out and clicking my mouse furiously and going “please look good, please look good”
It’s so easy to get wrapped up in process before you’ve even gotten started, but once you do get started, things often seem much messier than when you were thinking about The One Right Way.
A neat process always sounds good. You’ll be asked about your process in interviews. You’ll talk about it in case studies. You might even try to follow it in earnest most of the time. In reality, though, I’d wager that you bounce around a little more than you care to admit.
Making things for humans is messy, because reality is messy! People change and the world changes and we face unending challenges along the way—but we persevere. We pivot, and we adapt, and we figure it out. That’s the beautiful part to me—that we muddle through it all.
If you drew the path you took from problem to solution, it might look more like a blind contour drawing of the wind than a double diamond, and that’s okay. The story of our lives probably looks pretty similar. Have a process, sure, but remember that much of life is improv.