Table of Contents
- Why is creativity important for UX career growth?
- You are already creative. Yes, YOU.
- How to build your creativity as a UX designer
- 1. Start absurdly small
- 2. Find one person who inspires you — then make it your own
- 3. Curate your information diet
- Your laziness is not the enemy
- Your health is your creative infrastructure
- When they reject your best idea: letting go without losing your mind
- Creativity is a practice, not a personality trait
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Why is creativity important for UX career growth?
Creativity isn't just nice to have in UX. It is the job.
When your creativity tanks, everything tanks with it. Your wireframes start looking the same. Your solutions feel recycled. You stop pushing back in design reviews because you don't have anything better to offer.
That disconnection has a cost. Not just to your work, but to your confidence. To how you show up in rooms. To whether you get promoted or get passed over.
If that sounds familiar, you're not broken. You're not uncreative. You've just never been taught how to actually feed your creativity.
In a stream, Chris talked with Lilibeth — a Lead Product Designer, UX educator at Memorisely, and founder of Soul Doodles. They’ve worked with hundreds of designers at every level. What they shared about how to channel your creativity will make a lot of sense for you.
Let’s dive in!
👉 The insight in this blog traces back to a thoughtful conversation with Lilibeth — here’s the full discussion:
You are already creative. Yes, YOU.
Here's the lie most UX designers quietly believe: "Other designers are creative. I'm more of a systematic thinker."
Rubbish.
If you've ever solved a problem — any problem — you are creative. Full stop.
Chris says it directly:
"If you solve any sort of problem, you are inherently creative — because maybe it's a problem that's new to you, and you have to connect the dots backwards based on your experience."
Lilibeth goes further. She's watched engineers — people who swear they have zero creativity — draw their favourite childhood characters with markers in FigJam workshops. And they're amazing at it. Every time.
Her take: creativity isn't about making the perfect masterpiece. It's about putting your soul into something. Making a meal look beautiful is creativity. Matching an outfit with intention is creativity. Taking a photo of a shadow that caught your eye — creativity.
"Everyone creates and everyone can create. Because if you make a nice meal and you put together something beautiful, that is creativity in there." — Lilibeth Linares
If you're a UX designer and you believe you're not creative, you've been defining creativity too narrowly. Widen the definition. It applies to you.
How to build your creativity as a UX designer
This is the practical bit. No philosophy. Just what works.
1. Start absurdly small
Lilibeth interviewed dozens of illustrators and artists over four years. The one tip they all gave:
"Start small — as simple as doodling, as simple as taking your phone and taking photos around."
Think of it like going to the gym. You don't start with a marathon. You start with ten minutes. You build the muscle.
The mistake most designers make is waiting for inspiration before starting. That's backwards. Action creates inspiration, not the other way around.
Pick one small creative act. A doodle. A photo. A sketch of what you see from your window. Do it today. Then tomorrow.
2. Find one person who inspires you — then make it your own
Lilibeth credits illustrator Pablo Stanig as one of her biggest creative influences. She didn't copy his style. She looked at his work and asked: what does he do that works for him? How can I make something like this, but mine?
"Find that illustrator, that photographer, that UX designer who inspires you to be even better than you know — and instead of comparing, ask what does this person do that can work for me?" — Lilibeth
The designer you admire didn't start good. They started doing. A lot.
Pick one person whose work makes you think "I want to make something like that." Follow their process. Then make it yours.
3. Curate your information diet
This is the one most designers overlook — and it's the highest leverage change you can make.
Chris's take is sharp:
"Inputs lead to outputs. If you only follow one type of content, you're shaping your brain to only produce one type of idea."
If every designer you follow makes the same type of portfolio posts, you'll make the same type of portfolio. If you only consume UX content, your ideas will sound like every other UX designer's ideas.
The fix: deliberately follow people from different worlds. Architecture. Food. Fashion. Science. Music. Sports psychology. Whatever pulls your attention.
Two ideas from completely different fields, colliding in your brain — that's where original thinking comes from. If you only know one world, those collisions never happen.
👉 Reading book is one of the way:
Your laziness is not the enemy
Let's address the uncomfortable one.
You have the idea. You know what you want to create. But you don't start. You scroll. You reorganize files. You reread the brief.
You're not lazy. You're procrastinating. And procrastination almost always masks something else — fear, perfectionism, or just being burned out.
But here's the flip: Bill Gates once said that if he needs something hard done, he gives it to a lazy person. Because they'll find the shortest path to get it done.
Chris echoes this:
"Lazy people are some of the most creative, because they are very creative about how to be lazy — and how to get the job done."
Use that instinct. If your creative block is really about not wanting to do it the long way, ask yourself: what's the shortest path to a first draft? What's the minimum version I can make today?
Start there. The full version comes after you've broken the seal.
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Your health is your creative infrastructure
This one's uncomfortable. Worth saying anyway.
If your body is exhausted, your creativity is offline. Not struggling — offline.
Lilibeth's analogy is one of the best I've heard:
"Your body is your home. I want my home to be clean, minimalist, simple — not full of dark black trash bags."
Chris admitted that he'd been neglecting his health for the sake of output. Building things. Shipping things. But not moving, not sleeping properly, not filling the tank.
The four areas Lilibeth checks when something feels off in her life: personal, professional, financial, spiritual. When one is broken, the others feel it. Creativity is always the first casualty.
This isn't Instagram wellness advice. This is practical UX career growth infrastructure. You cannot consistently produce good creative work from an empty, depleted brain.
Move before you sit. Sleep before you grind. The Figma file will still be there.
When they reject your best idea: letting go without losing your mind
This is the hardest creative skill. Harder than designing. Harder than presenting.
Letting go of an idea you love.
Chris spent two to three months building one UX Playbook product. Then built a different one in two weeks. The two-week one became the bestseller.
"It's really hard to separate emotional attachment from objective judgment. The way I learned was to launch faster — so I'm not so invested I can't give it up."
This is the sunk cost fallacy showing up in your design work. Just because you've spent time on something doesn't mean you have to see it through.
Lilibeth's practical fix: when you feel stuck on a rejected idea, go outside. Actually outside. Walk. Breathe. Come back later and ask: were they right? Sometimes the answer is yes, and that's the real creative skill — absorbing feedback without it crushing you.
"Sometimes you just have to go outside, have a breathe, think about other things — and you will find out that maybe, yeah, they were right." — Lilibeth
Creativity is a practice, not a personality trait
Creativity is not something you either have or don't have. It's not a gift some designers were born with and others weren't. It's a practice. A set of habits. A muscle that responds to use and atrophies with neglect.
There's no mysterious sauce here. There's just practice.
If your creativity feels completely dead right now — if you're staring at blank Figma files, recycling old patterns, dreading design reviews — check the fundamentals first. Are you sleeping? Moving? Filling your brain with things beyond UX Twitter? Talking to people outside your industry?
Sometimes the most important design tool you own is a morning walk and a meal that isn't eaten at your desk.
Start there. One small creative act today. Then tomorrow. Then the day after.
Your future self — and your portfolio — will feel the difference.
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