I’ve been practicing underthinking lately. As a way of minimising overthinking and maximising creative output. Maximising output is key. It’s about quantity over quality.
Some of the output—let me be honest—most of the output is shit. But some of it might turn out good. Who am I to judge?
The whole point of it is to get past the shit, and on to the actual work. Get past the overthinking and inaction, and on to the creative practice. And sharing the—at times agonising—results with the World.
Overthinking things is a big culprit in choking creativity. Lately I’ve been challenging myself to underthink and focus on quantity in my output.
I’ve made a simple dogmatic setup for myself:
Quickly put the first thing that pops into mind on paper…
Snap a photo with the phone and airdrop it to the computer…
Adjust levels in Photoshop, paste into Illustrator, image trace, quick edit…
Paste back into Photoshop (Smart Obj., new artboard), layout, tweak, fix…
Auto-export .png with File > Generate > Image Assets = Done!
To me, the key is to minimise the distance and amount of work I need to do from “idea” to “finished product”. I’ve set a very low barrier for what constitutes an idea, and a very low barrier for what a finished product is.
Best case is, that—given enough repetitions—I’ll come up with some design that’ll be good, or that I’ll end up with a body of work that as a whole will amount to.. well, something.
