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Why going for a walk helps designers overcome their creative block
How walking stimulates different areas of your brain allowing you to combat the creative block
We’ve all been there. Working on a design and suddenly we’re hit with a creative block. Before we know it, there’s a wall that Donald Trump would be proud of blocking our creative spark. Joy soon becomes frustration as we find ourselves searching the internet for inspiration to help conquer this hurdle.
For a number of years, I’ve faced many creative blocks and when each has struck, I’ve tried a range of remedies — all of which were usually office based.
Going for a walk, however, is widely recommended as our best remedy so below I intend to explain why, having now successfully adopted this, this in particular works for me.
We find inspiration from a different source
When going for a walk I intentionally use my eyes as I find that I’m surrounded by various forms of inspiration. Store logos, store signage, window posters ranging from sales, holidays, food, clothing and more, graffiti art, street signage – all of these inspire me. I examine each of these and study artwork composition detail such as depth, materials used, the effects of light (natural and artificial lighting), typography choice and artistic style. This analysis opens my mind and provides me with a range of techniques that can be considered for my challenge at hand.
We switch our brain activity
Going for a walk helps to remove our mindset from the burden of worry over our initial problem and opens the right side of our brain, our creative lobe, sparking our creative nerves to light.
When we face a creative block, we begin to over analyse and over stress the situation. Analysing and rationalising increases the activity within the left side of our brain — the side responsible for analytical thinking. Combating creative challenges requires us to be using the right side of our brain, the area responsible for…
