# take time to reflect As a design instructor, I always make my students take the time to write a reflection at the end of every bigger assignment or project. Most students seem to find it the most annoying part of the creative process even though I think of it as one of the most important things they can do to grow as artists and designers. Obviously, it is more fun to explore visual ideas and make things. There's joy in playing with paint or pushing pixels around. The magic of working at an image and seeing it come to life is sublime. That exhilaration is what got us into this creativity thing in the first place. The doing always seems more fun than thinking about what we did. Many young and inexperienced artists can't tell you what they were thinking or trying to do while they were working. Creativity is elusive and comes from the hidden, unknown depths. That can sound cool and mysterious and might be impressive to non-artists but can be extremely limiting to an artist that wants to continue being creative. How can they know what they are doing and where they are going? How can they repeat that magic? To me, it makes sense to want to understand that creative impulse so that it can be experienced over and over. It makes sense to know what worked and what didn't work, where there were successes and challenges. How exactly did we get from a random thought or idea and turn it into a finished product so that we can be just as successful next time? While it may not be the most fun, taking the time for self-feedback and self-understanding about what worked and didn't work helps us to feel more confident and capable in future projects. The better we know how our own creative process works then the better we will be able to navigate future creative challenges. We will know how to better approach the work and have a better sense of how to get around the challenges. Often the understanding doesn't come until the words are written down. Sometimes you need to [[write to understand]] the thinking. You find the insights and connections as you write. It is a process of [[active learning]] where [[discovery]] is made on the page. The sudden epiphanies about our own creative process can be just as magical as creating the art itself. In addition to finding personal understanding, it is important for professional artists to be able to express themselves intelligently to clients and patrons. This is good for fine artists but critical for visual designers. When you are working for a client, you need to be able to defend your ideas and explain how your solutions are solving the creative problem. Good design doesn't sell itself, especially if the client doesn't understand the creative process. **More stuff to explore:** - metacognition - figuring out the next thing to learn or do - growth mindset - journaling --- **Dig deeper:** - [the missing key to productivity is reflection from jocelyn k. glei](https://jkglei.com/reflection/) --- tags: #creativity #process #reflect home: [[! creative process]]