Not quite there yet

I recently learned that for some of you, this blog is the only reliable way to get updates from me. So yes, if you assumed I was still backpacking on the other side of the world, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But I’ve been back in Berlin for a while now, and one thing that’s been on my mind lately is creativity.

Building

I’m currently trying to build a website. The specifics of what it does aren’t as important as where it came from. It’s based on a concept I wrote down years ago (Google Drive says May 13, 2021) and then buried in a folder, waiting for me to catch up. Back then, I didn’t have the time and skills to build it. Now, I think I might, and I’m taking a shot at it.

Looking at it through my experience as a designer, I have this rule of thumb: being self-explanatory is always a sign of a functional design. You know a design is good when you don’t need to explain it. And right now, I’m still explaining it. I'm still adding little notes and helpers here and there to explain what the site does or what these numbers mean. That’s how I know it’s not quite there yet.

Now that the first prototype is live, I’m facing a challenge I thought only startup founders worried about: getting people to see the vision and understand what you’re trying to build. In my head, it all makes sense, but based on the early feedback I’ve gotten, there’s still a big gap between what I imagine and what others perceive.

It hurts a little, but it’s also exactly what I need. The scalability of my model or the backend infrastructure are actually ten or twenty problems in the future and, for now, don’t matter as much as I think they do. The problem I need to solve right now is helping people understand what problem I’m even solving.

__

Writing

Besides this project, I’ve also been writing on topics that don’t quite fit here, so I’ve been publishing them elsewhere. Not for an audience, but just for me. It’s technically all public, but not written for any specific audience. I just feel like writing without any pressure of being read, and these pieces don’t feel complete until I publish them somewhere. Pressing “publish” scratches some kind of itch I don’t want to use social media for.

Lately, I’ve accidentally found myself writing in new formats. One piece started as a loose idea without a clear structure, and was just some concept I wanted to explore. Over a few days, it evolved into something that was obviously a script for a video essay. I didn’t mean to write one, but by the end, that’s clearly what it was. Too big for a blogpost, too small for a book, and definitely needing visual support to get the point across: just the right shape for a 10-15 minute video.

This script is now quietly waiting for me to pick it up in Google Drive. I can easily visualize what it looks like just by reading it. Will I ever shoot and edit it? Who knows. Should I just hand it down to someone else to produce it? That’s not really the point. Having written it is the point.

__

Creativity on two dimensions

Creative expression is something I’ve struggled with throughout my career as a designer, and more broadly, as a creative. I know that might sound like a contradiction, but bear with me.

Here’s the paradox: I’ve spent years in roles where creativity was supposedly at the core of the job, yet real creative range wasn’t often encouraged. In my experience, companies looking for “creative” talent are mostly looking for depth first (mastery in one core area) and only then, maybe, for range. You’re hired to do one thing really well. You might bring something extra to the table but your role is defined, and usually narrow. We need you to be as good as possible and as creative as possible, but only for this exact thing.

Looking back on my career, I can confidently say I’ve always preferred roles that gave me room to express my range, not just my depth. Those were the periods when I felt most creatively alive: when I was doing my core job well enough, but also being pulled into adjacent problems. Not things completely outside my job description, but close enough for someone to say, “Hey, maybe you could take a look at this too?”

This is how I got my first job as a creative. My manager understood that while I was hired for project management, he could also trust me to help create or edit visual assets. That same curiosity is why I rarely said no to image editing or marketing tasks, even when I was officially a UX Designer. It’s also how I ended up spending entire days cosplaying as a data analyst, digging through dashboards to better understand the problem I was solving, just before giving a design presentation.

Today, on the website I’m building, it means I can critically look at tone of voice, typography, or flaws in a data pipeline calculation, not perfectly, but well enough to move things forward. Curiosity and range. That’s why.

This tension between depth and range has shaped how I think about creativity. Depth is going all-in on a single craft. Getting better, sharper. Find your one thing and keep doing it for as long as you can. Go on a run every day for a year and your last run is easier, longer, or both, compared to your first one. Draw every day for a year and your last drawing is better than the first one. Practice a music instrument every day for a year and eventually, you can actually play it. With discipline and repetition, progress becomes visible, when you explicitely go for depth.

Range is something else entirely: trying new things, jumping between mediums, exploring across disciplines, formats, and ideas. It’s about going as wide as possible and seeing if you can make sense of it all. These days, I’m bouncing between two completely unrelated projects. I might spend tomorrow learning how to shoot and edit a video essay, then go back to debugging code the next day. The day after that, I’m rewriting a paragraph until it sounds right. It’s scattered, sometimes chaotic, but it’s not aimless. And no matter how disciplined you are, the progress is harder to measure. It doesn’t show up as a single, polished output. It happens between things, not within one.

From the outside, it might seem like I’m not getting anywhere. But I know I am.

So this is where I am today, creatively speaking: not going deep, but wide. This isn’t a detour, but the entire point.