Sometimes I need to do something rebellious as a designer.

Of course, right now I switched professionally into UX/UI and web design and have a solid and real design process to work on projects, but there were times in my life when there was no stable process at all.

The times of Photoshop.

I jumped into it instead of Figma when I was a teenager and (vanished for days) started my cool creative process of photo editing.

Back in 2012, I had a few anonymous Tumblr accounts (so that my classmates wouldn't find me haha not sure why exactly) and a few fan communities, first on a huge pop star whose name I'd rather not tell now, and on The Vampire Diaries, a hyping TV show of that time.

One of my communities gathered like... 3000 people or something, which was huge for me as a teen. I even had an assistant to handle content writing for me while I handled the design of memes, edited images, etc.

We did it completely as an unpaid hobby, but man we were excited...

You can see an example of my then-photo editing attached below.

I still do a similar thing to reconnect with my childish self. I still jump into design software — these years it's Figma — to design something that just comes to my mind, not for commercial purposes. It reminds me of stretching for sportspeople — something like an exercise. Helps me think, helps me come up with something while actually designing stuff.

It's a beautiful moment when the world just stops, and no business competitors exist, no market research, no industry standards, no metrics to improve — you just design whatever you like. You might not even show it to anyone later, and it definitely doesn't mean that your real design service would be as loose and relaxed as this process.

It's for you.

Do you have any exercises to boost creativity in similar ways? Share in the comments what you do to reconnect with your childish self :)