“It can skew your perception of what your ideas should look like”

Creative Career Conundrums is a weekly advice column from If You Could Jobs. Each week their selected panel of professionals from the creative industry answers your burning career questions to help you navigate the creative journey.

This week’s question:

“In our fast-paced world, how can we stay up-to-date without losing our minds? When gathering favourite creators, studios, foundries, educational projects, and other resources, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the endless information flow. How can we meaningfully follow design news without drowning in frustration?

The constant stream of content consumes too much daily time, often leaving no space to reflect on why certain designs work. We get bombarded with visuals flashing before our eyes. I notice that trying to keep up with everything often leads to anxiety and burnout, while truly talented people focus deeply on what resonates with them.

Should we consciously choose just a few sources and let the rest go unnoticed? How can we find a healthy balance between staying informed and preserving our creative energy?”

Katie Cadwell, co-founder of branding studio Lucky Dip and The NDA Podcast:

I live by the mantra ‘less but better’. Personally, I find the constant stream of design not only overwhelming, but not helpful for my creative practice. Without knowing it, you’re subconsciously storing away all these projects. They could end up manifesting in your own work. It’s also unhelpful to compare your work-in-progress to finished work all the time. It can skew your perception of what your ideas should look like initially. Scrappy, a little unpolished, and focused on the concept. Which is a far cry from the beautiful case studies we see.

Ask yourself, when you’re starting a project, do you just endlessly scroll these sites or do you look for references specific to your brief? I know that if I’m working on an environmental project for example, I’m more likely to be looking at plant illustrations, maps or travel photographers than I am at the latest music posters and cool cafe brands that are in my feed.

Think about how references can work harder for you. I collect typefaces I like so that I can access that particular board when I’m coming to that part of a project. The power of my reference boards is in the curation. I use sites like Are.na which don’t work like Pinterest – serving you endless content that looks the same. It is a little more unexpected in its results, so it’s not as easy to get lost or overwhelmed.

To keep up-to-date on the big releases, set aside a time-capped period to check the blogs. Maybe a Friday afternoon for a few hours, or half an hour at the start of each day. Separate out your social feeds so you can scroll dog videos out of hours without being bombarded with creative when you should be switching off.

In answering your creative career conundrums we realise that some issues need expert support, so we’ve collated a list of additional resources that can support you across things that might arise at work.

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