3 Reasons Why You're Stuck In A Design Rut

You arrive at your desk in the morning. It’s only Monday. You sit down, turn on your monitor and while listening to the fan busily spinning faster and faster in the CPU, realise that you aren’t in the mood to even be where you are today. What happened and why do you feel this way? Isn’t it one of the great desires in life to find a job where you can work as if you don’t need the money, simply because you enjoy what you do? Identifying the cause is the first step to solving the problem; here are the three most common diagnoses.


1) You’ve Forgotten Why You Love Web Design

Like any art form, you’re going to hit a wall sooner or later. You just want to get started, but you can barely bring yourself to make finger and keyboard meet. Something that you used to enjoy so much has become a pain, a turn-off if you like. The thing with web design is that it’s a service with a high commercial value and demand. Surely that’s one of the biggest factors you thought up of when you decided to turn your hobby into your career: making money out of something you enjoy.

But for the most part, there isn’t much to enjoy about meeting deadlines, designing something which you know looks crap but you’re still made to design anyway and payment disputes. Basically, selling your trade as a web designer wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be. Designing for someone else isn’t the same as creating something for your own enjoyment.



2) Being Limited to Clients Who Want the Same Designs

Though it’s something that you can’t always control, if you’re working for a big design firm that distributes work to you, you might find that the stuff that you come up with for them starts looking more and more similar which each design draft that you send to them.

You just want to let loose and create for the sake of creating, unfettered by design requirements and so forth, but all you’re being given is the same, old, corporate-feeling design guidelines. You at least want to be challenged by creating something that no one’s seen before

Sooner or later, you get used to it. You don’t exercise your creative muscle and then out of the blue, you’re given an assignment where you have to design for a toy store, say. That’s when you realise it’ll take you longer than usual to come up with a suitable design after being exposed to monotone for so long.



3) You Don’t Get Along With Colleagues and Can’t Agree With Clients

Working with clients and colleagues is a perpetual balancing act that can be stressful and frustrating in any industry. With clients, this is a common sequence of events for much cause of headache:

1.They want you to design their website to their requirements,

2.You make a suggestion as to how it might look better,

3.They shoot it down and make you follow their design criteria,

4.You finish the design draft and send it over,

5.They don’t like it and ask you to try doing it your way.

With colleagues, it’s even worse. You can be made to feel incompetent. Since when did creativity have hierarchy and order? Unfortunately, if you rely on this constant flow of projects as a form of income, you have little choice but to take it as it comes. Instead of creating, you can’t wait to get the project over and done with, and this unpleasant feeling perpetuates. Before you know it, your creativity stagnates.



These diagnoses aren’t without a cure. There are several, simple solutions that you can use straight away to reignite your passion for web design.



About the Author

Mathew Carpenter is an 18-year-old business owner and entrepreneur from Sydney, Australia. Mathew is the owner of AddToDesign, a website which provides value added design buzz, along with Design-Newz, the premier source for aggregated design news. Follow Mathew on Twitter: @matcarpenter.


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http://www.addtodesign.com/2010/04/3-reasons-why-you%E2%80%99re-stuck-in-a-design-rut/