If you were to give me a pencil, a piece of paper, a time limit of 30 minutes, and a random topic, I could try and draw you something magnificent. My pen will dance across the paper, the ideas flowing, and creativity will feel like it is taking over. By the end, I will probably look at at my paper and notice that it looks almost identical to how I used to draw pictures in the 2nd grade. It is so embarrassing. For quite a while, I would avoid any opportunity I had to draw because it was so bad. However, one thing I have always been able to do is to express myself on a screen. That could be on a screen because it would get printed for a book report in elementary school or a design system for the work that I do now. I have always taken the things that I see in the world and translate them to these tiny little screens that we look at. But there has always been a design block in these programs that has been quite difficult to overcome.
Let me back up a little bit. It was 1st grade and I was the kind of kid that would go off and draw on one of those rolls of paper an endless amount of drawings; little cities in the sky, airplanes flying between planets, skateboarding, the ocean, just about anything. Who knows if it was any good, it was just pure fun and creative expression. The more that I have progressed in my design work, the more that I have realized that I need to balance it out with the pure, boundless joy of creativity. But, that is the hardest part to break out of. I usually operate within some sort of system. A system that I design that has room for flexibility, but guardrails for safety. It is the way that I look at product design as a way to show complete expression within the bounds of limitation. If there were no limits, I would argue that we would have a stagnation of innovation. Whether we like it or not, constraints usually have a direct correlation with performance and creativity. However, not everything has to have a guardrail. Why not break the design system, see what is possible to find out new possibilities, play.
Tonight my wife and I had a design challenge where we took on a random design idea that Claude gave us and we had to design it in 30 minutes in Figma. Moonbeam. This is a shorter post because, as ridiculous as this seems, I'm proud of this little thing I created. And I want it to just be a reminder to have fun.
Free the Moonbean!