Researchers tracked 355 adults over 13 days using daily diary surveys and found that professional artists tend to experience negative emotions the morning after their most creative days, even though creativity, while in the process of making art, reliably improves their moment-to-moment feeling states.
The truth is that an unfinished creative project can have far-reaching negative effects on the artists/makers/creatives who surround themselves, their workshops, their hard drives, and their kitchen tables with projects left undone. Research suggests that ruminating about unfinished projects interferes with sleep-particularly on weekends (Syrek, Weigelt, Peifer & Antoni, 2017). Aren't weekends the time when we creatives get things done?
I remember a time when designing felt like speaking a secret language, a series of precise clicks and drags that, while powerful, felt more technical than fluid. Over the past three decades the evolution of design interfaces has been a journey from pixels to objects to concepts-each step abstracting away technical complexity and bringing us closer to pure creative intent.