Tell me if this sounds familiar, you're in a weekly design crit...
Everyone's cameras were off. Work was good enough but felt… too safe. No spark. No "what if we tried this crazy thing?" Just polite nods and "looks good to me."
I've been in more than one of those sessions.
Usually after that meeting, I think to myself:
Is this the best work we can do?
IMO, safe work might be a designers biggest enemy.
Bland. Mediocre. Emotionless. Going through the motions.
(unless you're in Enterprise SaaS lol)
But as a consumer of things, like you, I can feel how much love was put into a product.
The details. The thoughtfulness. The essence of what makes this great.
My favourite examples (from design founders) are mymind, sublime, Hey, CleanShot X, and everything from Not Boring (FYI, not affiliated just love these).
There's definitely something you feel when using these products.
Lots of design managers I speak to think in order to produce the best work, designers need rest.
I don’t 100% agree.
We all need rest. But what do designer's need more than rest?
Creative fuel.
Have you ever felt "in the zone" during a whiteboarding session or playing a strategy game and know the exact move you've got to make. When you can feel your actually neurons making connections in real-time?
If you're nodding along... I call it creative fuel.
That feeling of "I'm on 🔥 right now".
Sure, PTOs, team offsites, and a casual drink with coworkers outside of the office helps, but I'd argue not that much.
What I think we need is space for wild thoughts.
To remember why we became designers in the first place.
To play. To create. To have fun. To bring ideas to life. To be weird and love it.
So here’s what my design team started doing instead of all the "standard" team-bonding activities:
15-minute creative exercises at the start of every weekly design team meeting:
You might think it's another team-building gimmick. I consider it a creativity CPR.
Within weeks, our meetings transformed.
People started proposing other team meeting shenanigans. The room felt looser. Work got more interesting. Energy came back. We ended up making our own exercises.
We don't need to force creativity. We just need to create the right conditions for it.
And sometimes those conditions look like drawing terrible portraits of your teammates without looking at the paper (example below).
A real example from my team, circa 2017, can you spot me?
Pro tip: use them as Slack profile pics and wait for someone outside of design team ask you what's going on lol.
Here's 10 proven creative exercises I've used with my teams to build trust, unlock imagination, and dampen creative burnouts ↓
Another designer said "the government just dropped the hardest texture pack of 2026" 😂
Then @itsjamiecho put together an infinite canvas on Cosmos called ufo.zip (OMFG)
You can download all 184 pages here. This kinda stuff is why I love our corner of the internet. Designers FTW 🖤
Ever forget the name of common UI components? Yeh me too. "we should add a thingy", "let go for a what-you-call-it", or "why not just use that pattern", and so on...
Whatcha think? Likey or no-likey? On more thing...
You coming to the rectangles launch party? I'm going live on May 27th to speak all about this logo, version that didn't make the cut, and everything brand design.
Bring snacks, beers, and questions. It's gonna be a fun hour ↓
