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Creativity in UX design

Maria Taneva
UX Collective
Published in
9 min readFeb 3, 2025

How creative do we get to be in our job as UX designers?

Them: “And what do you do for work?”

Me: “Oh, I’m a UX designer”

Them: “A designer? How nice that you do something where you can be creative every day. So could you design my logo for me?”

Me:

Generally when the title “designer” is brought up, it has associations with surface-level work, such as “making things look pretty” or the generic term “being creative.” It’s often seen or understood through the lens of visual and aesthetic work.

A lot of aspiring designers go into the profession hoping that they can spend their time being creative and putting out beautiful things, only to discover the reality of technical constraints, budgets, resources, planning, strategy, research and data ruling the decisions over creative input.

My argument here is that these things don’t mean you cannot be creative or that they limit you; it’s often that the term “designer” is misunderstood, much like what it means to be creative.

Different strokes for different folks

To some, creating a new logo is more creatively satisfying than working on a…

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Maria Taneva

UX designer, former architect. Design topics, changing careers, design systems, books, video games 📚 and other things in between.

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