How do you tell when you’ve become set in your creative direction? By this I mean the processes, skills, disciplines and behaviour that you employ to be creative. For example wireframe > look and feel > prototype > delivery. These may be some of the creative processes a web designer may use to see a web development project through from beginning to end.

Why would you need to change this process? I was recently sent a link to an article listing no end of constraints that a designer faces in trying to develop a website. It was called Factors Limiting The Organizational Influence Of Design. It was a pretty big list and the limits seemed very familiar. But I asked myself what would I change about my creative working processes to overcome those limits?

For example, if time is tight I will be asked to develop wireframes and look-and-feel in parallel. But this means the usability testing on the wireframes will get skipped. People will jump from tricky conversations about user journey, functionality and accessibility to a conversation about brand colour and layout because it’s more fun. The problem is, you’ve built a great looking website and it turns out the user can’t navigate around it. Looks good, works badly

So a shortened timeframe meant I folded two stages of the design process into one, and skipped one of the checks on quality  – the usability. I haven’t changed direction, I have just shortened the journey. But should I have fundamentally changed my whole process? I like to think of this as ‘doing a Guston’.

Philip Guston was a successful abstract painter in America in the Fifties and Sixties who, in 1970 in New York,  turned his back on abstract painting and started painting giant cartoonish figurative paintings – an act for which he took a lot of criticism. I was reminded of all this by an article in this weekend’s Guardian.

So how do you change direction? There are lots of things I could do. Do I need to be getting real? Do I need to have a scrum? Should I be agile ?

I think it is possible for creative people to change direction. But it’s very difficult personally as you may have become too attached to your own creative direction, processes, skills, disciplines and behaviours. If you change, people may not like the results. That’s one of the consequences of doing a Guston. But hey, worstward ho
‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

That’s too pretentious a quote to end with, but I think you can’t ever be satisfied with your creative direction although it’s very difficult to change it. As a web designer, I don’t think I have ever thought I was right. But you have to work very hard at being less wrong than everybody else. And that requires you to be constantly changing your creative direction.