17 ways to keep your creativity alive while your FT job tries to kill it
Survival tactics from Raf, Prada, Wales Bonner, Simone Rocha, Doechii, a few random creative directors, and me
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Having a BIG CREATIVE job in design, fashion, advertising, or tech can massively crush, drain, squeeze, and squash your creativity. I spent fourteen years working creative jobs in NYC; art book designer, trend researcher, photo editor to photo director. And I know how fast your own work and passion can disappear under everyone else’s deadlines. ☠️
Even if your job says you can take a “field trip” or gallery day, it often still feels like they’d prefer you strapped to your desk and cranking. Sorry fellas, that’s not how good work comes into the world. You need outside practices to keep your brain free wheeling and singing.
This is a field guide to keep you in check. Instead of the banal “drink more water” and “log off your phone,” these are repeatable tactics stolen directly from the icons—Raf, Prada, Wales Bonner, Simone Rocha—plus emerging designers and working creative directors, people whose entire lives are built around keeping the flow of ideas gushing.
We need all need time to dream and to be paid for it.
17 Ways to Stay Creative and Alive
1. Raf Simons’ Subculture Case Study
Raf Simons doesn’t moodboard other designers; he studies youth cultures and scenes: New Wave kids, club kids, hardcore straightedge fans and treats their “dress codes and gestures and attitudes” like a research project.1
✏️ Use it: Pick one micro‑scene you can actually observe and study them for a month—photos, notes, tiny sketches.
2. Re-Re-Re Raf’s Three‑Reference Rule
He complains that the internet makes it too easy to skim and that people “don’t look deeply anymore,” so he re‑watches the same films, re‑listens to the same albums, and re‑reads the same books for years.
✏️ Use it: For the next month or season cap yourself at three core references and gorge on only those; no new inspo until they start to feel over‑familiar and strange. Go deep!! Rewind.
3. Prada’s Hate‑Watch Brief
For one menswear collection, Miuccia Prada started from a book about golf clothes, a world she found ridiculous and uninteresting, and used that boredom as a problem to solve.
✏️Use it: Once a quarter, pick a visual world you’re allergic to: Taylor Swift, newscasters fashion, corporate swag—and force yourself to build one small project from it (a layout, a capsule, a speculative brand).
4. Prada’s Wrong‑Color Method
Miuccia Prada is drawn to what feels “wrong” at first—ugly/beautiful, bourgeois/perverse—and uses that friction as material, not something to correct.2
✏️Use it Start one project with a obviously “bad” choice (color, typeface, proportion) and make it non‑negotiable; your job is to make everything around it so considered that the wrong thing starts to look inevitable.
5. Wales Bonner’s Private Syllabus
Grace Wales Bonner begins with a focused research theme: spiritual traditions, Black intellectual history, specific musicians. She builds a collage of books, archives, images, and sound long before sketching clothes.3
✏️Use it: Pick one idea for the next 8 weeks and make yourself a tiny syllabus (three texts, two films, one playlist); only then are you allowed to “design” from that research.
6. The Research Club Coffee
Grace Wales Bonner talks about sharing research with collaborators as a core part of her process: discussing books, music, and images together, not in isolation.
✏️Use it: Start a low‑stakes “research club” with one friend: monthly coffee where the only agenda is “show me three things that are feeding you right now,” no career talk allowed.
7. Simone Rocha’s Texture Memory
Simone Rocha keeps returning to textures and scenes from rural Ireland — hay, pearls, churches, uniforms. She then turns those tactile memories into silhouettes and materials (tulle, lace, heavy boots).4
✏️Use it: Choose one physical memory (church pews, school linoleum, your grandmother’s pierogies, childhood wood paneled bedroom) and translate it into shapes, materials, or grids for a small series.
8. Simone’s Three‑Woman Cast
Simone Rocha thinks in terms of “strong women” of different types and ages and designs for that cast, not an abstract customer.
✏️Use it: For each project, pick three specific women (real or imagined—your manager, your teen self, the woman you always see at the walking with her dog) and design for the friction between them.
9. The One‑Block Collection
Interviews with emerging NYC designers show how literally they design for the city: subway stairs, office AC, bodegas, cramped apartments.5
✏️Use it: Pick one route you walk every day (home to train, desk to coffee) and design for that specific stretch—the weather on that corner, the awkward doorway, the sprint across the avenue.
10. The Commute Runway Review
It’s this simple. Designers and stylists constantly mention walking, cafés, bookstores, and parks as their main inspiration. Watching how strangers actually put themselves together.
✏️Use it: Treat your commute like fashion week: each day, record three outfits or styling decisions that catch you (especially the “bad” ones) in a notes app or quick sketch.
11. In Bed Habit
I read and write every morning in bed and every night in bed. It’s a bookmark on either end of the day. Morning is writing, a book chapter, and coffee in bed; night is reflection, a book chapter, and my CBD drink, Magic Cactus.
✏️Use it: Claim the first and last 20 minutes of your day as “horizontal studio time”—no email, no Slack—just reading and scribbling so your brain checks in with itself before and after it works for everyone else.
12. The Daily Throwaway
Many working designers say they find new ideas while they’re already making: sketching outfits for fictional characters, testing upcycling tricks, trying crafts just for themselves.
✏️Use it: Commit to one tiny “throwaway” every day (a thumbnail, a color study, a type lockup, a collage) that is explicitly not for clients or your employer.
13. The Reckless Side Deadline (Doechii‑coded)
Doechii talked about calling her label to say she’d drop an album in 30 days with zero songs done, partly to outrun doubt and perfectionism.6
✏️Use it: Give yourself a mildly unhinged deadline: a 10‑look concept deck, a mini‑zine, a five‑image series. ‘Call your label’ or tell one person - that will keep you on task.
14. The For‑Me‑First Project
Doechii builds some songs completely for herself, ignoring formulas and what might “hit,” trusting the right audience will find it later.
✏️Use it: Once a year, make one project you would still make if the internet vanished. It’s there to keep your private taste safe.
15. The CD Hour: No Logos
Creative director job descriptions and interviews describe mornings blocked out for thinking, brief‑writing, and reviewing work before meetings eat the day.
✏️Use it: Steal one protected hour (early morning, late night, or a weekend slot) where you only think, write, sketch, or review your own work. You’re not a monster for taking this time to yourself.
16. The Archive Brain
Angel Jhang, Creative Director at Goop, says most people in her field are really just good at storing and retaining ‘archived imagery’ and cultural timelines, and that’s where she goes first when a brief lands.7
✏️Use it: Start a lightweight archive – save screenshots, campaign stills, layouts, and details in one place and tag them by mood (“soft dog,” “severe cold,” “cheap tickets,” “ritual gods”) so future‑you can raid them on a deadline instead of doomscrolling. PRINT THEM AND PUT THEM INTO FOLDERS or a book!
17. The Mundane Objects Break Time
This comes from Neada Deters, Founder & Creative Director of LESSE, in the same Coveteur piece. She name natures, twentieth‑century sculpture, ceramics, and “moments of quiet amidst chaos” as their actual inspiration—less feed, more physical object.
✏️Use it: Go look at objects: Bloomingdales table wear section, a ceramics shop, a hardware store. You’re there for mass, texture, and proportion, not content.
You don’t have to implement all 17 things. Pick one and run and have fun with it for a week or a month. Or for one hour.
Your company will happily eat every ounce of your creative energy and call it “being passionate.” You are allowed to redirect some of it back to yourself.
We still need time to dream and to be paid for it.
News: I was featured in It’s Nice That for my perspective on creative rituals, repetition, and reconnecting with practice. Written by Danielle Pender. Art by Edie Medley who drew this portrait of me and my dog.
What number do you want to try out? Why? Tell us in the comments. We want to know.
Raf Simons tips: https://the-talks.com/interview/raf-simons/
Miuccia Prada tips: https://www.interviewmagazine.com/fashion/miuccia-prada
Grace Wales-Bonner tips: https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/wales-bonner-on-art-research-and-her-collections
Simona Roche tips: https://www.haloscope.org/post/simone-rocha-knows-what-it-is-to-be-just-a-girl
Emerging designer tips: https://www.whowhatwear.com/fashion/best-new-designers-fall-2024
Doechii tips on Popular, research credits there. rakowwwski.substack.com
Creative Directors tips: https://coveteur.com/creative-directors-interview
Obsessed with this article! So original and actually useful :)
2. Re-Re-Re Raf’s Three‑Reference Rule - I feel like this is me. I don't move on to the next watch, read or content until I've had time to let the current ones marinate and I've either written about it or had a conversation dissecting it. I love it