Occasionally, when I tell someone what I do for a living, I’ll hear something along the lines of, “I couldn’t do your job. I’m no good at art.”
I’ve always found that an interesting response.
I understand where it comes from. Design is often associated with being able to draw, having an eye for colour or making things look attractive. And while those skills certainly have their place, they’re only a small part of what I do.
For me, the interesting part has always been the thinking behind it.
Understanding a problem, questioning assumptions, making connections and finding a way to communicate something. Sometimes that involves drawing, sometimes writing code, and occasionally it involves doing neither.
I think we have a tendency to confuse creativity with artistic ability. We decide quite early in life whether we’re creative or not, often based on whether we were any good at drawing at school.
But some of the most creative people I’ve encountered wouldn’t describe themselves as artistic at all. They’re engineers, developers, problem-solvers or people who simply have an unusual way of looking at things.
After more than two decades working across design, development and technology, I’ve come to realise that what connects everything I do isn’t necessarily a particular skill.
It’s how I think.
What working in agencies taught me
I spent a significant part of my career working in agency environments, where you’re often moving between different clients, industries and problems.
One day you might be working on a website, the next a branding project or something completely unfamiliar. You learn to adapt quickly, understand different audiences and find solutions within the constraints of a brief, budget or deadline.
That variety can be a brilliant education.
You encounter different ways of working, different expectations and plenty of situations where you have to figure things out as you go along.
But one of the biggest lessons I took from agency life was that the brief isn’t always the problem.
A client might ask for a new website because their existing one isn’t generating enquiries. But is the design really the issue? Could it be the messaging, the product, the audience or something happening elsewhere in the business?
It’s tempting to jump straight into producing what has been requested, particularly when deadlines are involved.
I’ve learnt that spending a little more time understanding the problem can save an enormous amount of time solving the wrong one.
Lesson 1: Don’t confuse the brief with the problem.
Before starting anything, try asking what has prompted the request. What isn’t working? What would a successful outcome actually look like?
Sometimes the most useful contribution you can make is questioning whether the proposed solution is needed at all.
Moving in-house changed my perspective
Moving from agency work into an in-house role introduced a different way of thinking.
In an agency, projects often have a relatively defined beginning and end. You research, design, develop, deliver and eventually move on to something else.
Working in-house gives you the opportunity to see what happens afterwards.
You live with the decisions you’ve made. You see how people use what you’ve built, how it performs, what needs improving and which ideas perhaps weren’t quite as clever as they initially seemed.
You also gain a much deeper understanding of the business itself.
Rather than approaching each project as a relatively isolated piece of work, you begin to see how everything connects. Design, development, marketing, customer experience, technical infrastructure and business objectives all influence one another.
A website problem might actually be a messaging problem. A marketing problem might be related to the product itself. And a technical improvement might have a much greater impact than an entirely new design.
It’s encouraged me to think less about individual deliverables and more about the wider system.
Lesson 2: Think beyond the thing you’re making.
Consider what happens after launch. Who will maintain it? How will you know whether it’s working? What other parts of the business might it affect?
A successful project isn’t necessarily one that looks impressive on the day it’s delivered. It’s one that continues to be useful long afterwards.
Learning to question the obvious
One thing I’ve become increasingly interested in is how easily we fall into familiar ways of solving problems.
Design and development are full of established principles, best practices and conventions. Many exist for very good reasons, and ignoring them simply to be different rarely helps anyone.
But I do wonder whether we sometimes become too comfortable repeating what we’ve learnt.
We use familiar layouts, follow similar processes and look towards competitors for inspiration. Before long, everyone starts producing variations of the same thing.
It’s particularly noticeable in digital marketing, where the tools and measurements available to us can encourage everyone towards similar solutions.
If everyone is looking at the same data, following the same advice and optimising towards the same objectives, where does differentiation come from?
I’ve found that some of the most useful questions are also the simplest.
Why are we doing this? What are we assuming? What happens if we approach it differently?
Lesson 3: Learn the rules, but don’t stop questioning them.
Established approaches are useful starting points, not necessarily the final answer.
It’s worth occasionally stepping away from the obvious solution and considering what you might be missing.
Understanding behaviour is as important as understanding technology
Later in my career, while studying UX and UI, I became increasingly interested in human behaviour.
I’d always been curious about why people make certain decisions, but studying user experience gave me another way of thinking about it.
We can create technically excellent websites, carefully considered interfaces and beautifully designed experiences, but none of that guarantees people will behave as we expect.
People don’t always make logical decisions. They rely on habits, assumptions, previous experiences and countless other influences that aren’t immediately obvious.
And sometimes the way people actually use something is very different from the way we imagined they would.
This has encouraged me to become more interested in behavioural science and the psychology behind decision-making.
Not because I think every problem needs a psychological explanation, but because understanding people adds another dimension to creative problem-solving.
It’s also made me more cautious about accepting familiar UX principles without considering the context in which they’re being applied.
Lesson 4: Don’t design for the person you assume exists.
Try to understand the people you’re designing for, the circumstances in which they’re making decisions and what might be influencing their behaviour.
Data can tell you what’s happening, but it doesn’t always explain why.
And sometimes a conversation with a real person reveals something that hours of analysing dashboards never would.
The value of knowing a little about a lot
I’ve never found it particularly easy to fit what I do into a single job title.
Over the years I’ve worked across graphic design, branding, development, UX, SEO, marketing and various other disciplines.
I’ve sometimes wondered whether that lack of specialisation was a disadvantage.
There are certainly situations where deep expertise in one particular area is essential, and I’ve worked with specialists whose knowledge goes far beyond my own.
But I’ve also come to appreciate the value of understanding how different disciplines connect.
Knowing how something is developed can influence how you design it. Understanding marketing can change how you approach user experience. Knowledge of hosting infrastructure can reveal why a website isn’t performing as expected.
These connections become particularly useful in an in-house environment, where decisions rarely exist in isolation.
Lesson 5: Develop depth, but stay curious about what’s happening around it.
You don’t need to become an expert in everything.
Understanding enough about neighbouring disciplines to ask informed questions, recognise opportunities and communicate with specialists can be incredibly valuable.
Sometimes your contribution isn’t having all the answers. It’s recognising that the answer might exist somewhere outside your own area of expertise.
Why I still make things for no particular reason
Outside work, I spend a lot of time experimenting with things that have no obvious commercial purpose.
Drawing, photography, generative art, coding little experiments, building models and making physical objects.
Some projects work, others don’t. Occasionally I lose interest halfway through and move on to something completely different.
For a long time, I probably considered these activities separate from my professional life.
But I’m beginning to think they’re more connected than I realised.
When you’re making something without a client brief, deadline or measurable objective, you have the freedom to experiment.
You can follow an idea simply because it interests you. You can make mistakes, explore unexpected results and change direction without having to justify every decision.
That freedom is increasingly valuable when so much of our professional work is measured against performance indicators and business objectives.
And it’s surprising how often something learnt through a seemingly unrelated hobby becomes useful elsewhere.
Lesson 6: Make room for curiosity without expecting a return.
Not every creative activity needs to become a side hustle, portfolio piece or professional development exercise.
Sometimes making something simply because you want to is reason enough.
The value might not be immediately obvious, and that’s perfectly fine.
Learning when not to create something
Perhaps one of the more surprising lessons from working across different disciplines is that creativity doesn’t always involve making something new.
Sometimes the best solution is to simplify what’s already there.
In development, that might mean removing unnecessary complexity rather than introducing another framework. In design, it could mean reducing the number of choices rather than adding more features.
In marketing, it might mean communicating an existing benefit more clearly rather than launching another campaign.
There’s a tendency in creative industries to associate progress with producing something tangible. A new design, a new feature, a new strategy.
But knowing when not to create something requires judgement too.
Working in-house has reinforced this for me. When you’re responsible for maintaining and improving something over several years, you become much more aware of the long-term consequences of decisions.
Lesson 7: Don’t mistake more work for better work.
Before creating something new, consider whether improving, simplifying or even removing something might achieve a better result.
The most creative solution isn’t necessarily the most complicated or visually impressive one.
Sometimes it’s the one nobody notices because everything simply works.
It’s how you approach the problem
I still enjoy the practical side of what I do. Designing, writing code, experimenting with new technologies and seeing an idea become something real.
But as my career has developed, I’ve become increasingly interested in the thinking that happens before any of those things.
The questions we ask, the assumptions we challenge and the connections we make between different experiences.
Agency life taught me to adapt, work across different problems and think quickly.
Moving in-house has taught me to think more deeply about the consequences of decisions, the relationships between different parts of a business and the value of improving something over time.
My interests outside work have reinforced the importance of curiosity, experimentation and occasionally doing things without knowing where they’ll lead.
And studying human behaviour has reminded me that even the most logical solution needs to make sense to the people experiencing it.
I’m still learning, and I expect my interests and the tools I use will continue to change.
But perhaps that’s why I’ve become less concerned with finding the perfect job title or defining myself through a particular set of skills.
The tools are important, and experience matters. But neither tells the whole story.
So when someone tells me they couldn’t do my job because they’re no good at art, I think about all the creativity that exists beyond drawing or design.
The person who finds a simpler way of doing something. The colleague who asks the question nobody else has considered. The engineer who sees a solution where everyone else sees a problem.
They’re all thinking creatively, even if they’d never describe themselves that way.
And perhaps that’s the biggest thing I’ve learnt over the years.
Creativity isn’t simply about what you can make. It’s about what you can see, question and imagine differently.
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