Just as every writer eventually experiences writer’s block, every designer will at some point in time hit a wall where they cannot easily continue designing through. When you’re grinding it out for a dayjob, it’s slightly easier - you at least have the paycheque to look forward to - but when you’re a part-time designer, or doing it out of the desire to be creative on your own behalf, it poses a very serious problem.

I get distracted far too easily. I have an upright piano in my room and a window that overlooks a busy street. My CD and Vinyl collections constantly need restructuring and, against my better judgment, I have a few law apps to get through. My dog will bring me my slippers and a frisbee and my neighbour will call to tell me that the game is on in an hour and he’s having a bar-b-que,

but damnit,

there is just something innate about being a designer that makes one so wonderfully stubborn as to not be able to put down the work even in the most trying of times.

So what do we do? We sit at the screen and stare, ftp up and down trying to fix one pixel that doesn’t matter in the long run anyway, twiddle our thumbs and mess up our code in the process of semi-sentient consciousness so badly that when we finally get into a mood where we can just work through the madness, we’ve already crippled our design to the extent that we’re backpeddling.

I say: end it! don’t try to stress yourself out through the designwork when you know it’s better saved for another day. There are plenty of things you can do to manage your time efficiently, allowing your most productive moods to come at the best possible moments. I’m working on a redesign over at my home pad, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let this slump beat me.
So let me take you through a little excercise in Design Slumpbusting: Better Designing Through Effective Time Wasting.

1. When the uselessness-feeling hits, set a timer for 30 minutes and do the most mundane, mindless task you can. I play tetris on my cell phone, and have even been known to gather up small amounts of money and deposit them into my winter jacket and raincoat pockets among other places, effectively giving myself a little jolt of happiness some months down the road. Seems pointless and off topic, but it takes your mind off the task at hand - when the time goes off after thirty minutes of meaningless dribble, you just know your mind is racing to get something productive done. The more mindless the task, the better relaxed your brain will be when the timer goes off.
2. Read up on the newest design resources, technologies, and languages that, while maybe not immediately useful to the task at hand, you’ll need to know anyway. One in ten resources I think will never be of much use to me ends up being of extreme importance within a few hours of discovering it, I find, on average. Some recent finds: a nice selection of free grungewriter fonts, automatic pullquotes, text-resize detection, a nice process article, an excellent grass-texture tutorial, and the now invaluable quickref.
3. If you’re stuck in the CSS, why not get your RSS validation up to par? If you’re stuck on javascript, why not get your xhtml validation level up to 1.1 strict and lose some of those i.e. hacks for more seo-friendly markup? There is always more than one way to solve a problem, and surprisingly often, you’ll find a new solution by the happiest of accidents if you look in the right places at the right times.
4. Close Dreamweaver and open Notepad. This will force you to start tabbing your own material and being more conscious of your semantic structure - there is no hand to help you at a basic level, and it will challenge you to become more fine tuned, and in a hurry.
5. Lose the lorem-ipsum: Looking at a page template that has the same mundane text on it that you’ve seen on a bajillion other page-templates over the years will lead you to think that your page will be no better than mundane, either. When context is lacking, content is king.
6. Use the Rendered Source Chart firefox extension. Sometimes you never know what you’re screwing up until it gets a yellow border, tabs itself, and slaps you in the face.
7. Preach to a non-standardist. Find your favourite table-layout-using, flash-navigation-dependant friend or colleague and get them to ask you about standards-based solutions. You might just get so fired up over your preaching that you’ll get the desire to practice it, too.
8. Go buy a coffee. Seriously, you need to get out of the house anyway - have you even changed your shirt in three days? Go. Coffee. Now.
9. When in doubt, handbook it. Or, hell, protolize it, like all the cool kids are doing nowadays.
10. Learn to know when to quit - you can’t design when you’re too tired. This isn’t sleepbusting. Some guys can work on four hours of sleep and still get a full day of work in, but those guys are not you - and more importantly, those guys are not going to be happy when they realize they’ve sidestepped a potential ajax security risk, and lost their database. s’all I’m saying.

So, that’s the gist of it - hope these help. What are your slumpbusting tips?

(psst: digg it up)

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