I'm a graphic designer. I've been working in the field for nearly seven years now, two of which in an actual agency. One afternoon I started on a project that was born of more or less pure spite - I love the annual art trading game Art Fight, but absolutely loathe how the game is run, how it comes completely crashing down every year due to people trying to access the site all at once and them not having any contingencies in place, and how the leadership there is apparently only concerned with donations and little community outreach. If you're unfamiliar, artists get sorted into one of two teams, upload their original characters with reference sheets and then draw characters belonging to the opposing team's members. It's great fun, and I tried volunteering for them, but the fact that I'd've to sign an NDA just to be a moderator is just a step too far. For those unaware, the Art Fight team was also caught embezzling donations in one of the last fights, 2022 if memory serves.

So I did what I do best. I started drafting user stories, did UX research, sketched, drew and designed what I'd think would solve all the problems with Art Fight. The result I called PICTOCLASH, and while the process to make and prepare the design took me about four weeks from start to finish, I knew I couldn't actually make the thing work. Disregarding the fact that the Art Fight platform is anaemic and runs on outdated PHP, has no optimisations for image storage or user content and does not buffer or queue database interactions, it's still a massive lift. We don't have numbers on how large AF is, but suffice it to say that it's far larger than any hobbyist project can be without VC involvement.

I was convinced, though, that if one just... approached the problem differently, maybe with modern technologies, the Next.JS I kept hearing about from my web design peers, maybe a shiny new database like Postgres, state management, all the things I know next to nothing about, this could work. My project could work. Yes, it's a lot of work, but it wouldn't be impossible. With a team of developers, all believing and contributing to the project in an open-source way, that's doable. Eminently realisable, even.

So I started. I began reading documentation for TS, Next, React, Prisma, Postgres and all the other things I'd need to read up on. This was maybe half a year ago. But damn, programming got hands. Even the Me-ChatGPT-Dream-Team wasn't enough to have me wrap my head around so many concepts here. I'm a front-end guy, that's for sure. I got my ass handed to me, and in a month, I barely have a login system, and looking at GitHub I could have just went with any of the many pre-rolled solutions.

Which just led me back to my original point. I have three hundred-odd lines of barely functional typescript that holds up an incredibly slow login system. I'm not cut out for this project, and I need to accept that. I'm a designer, I know PHP, I can write valid JavaScript, but... application development? That'll forever be a realm locked off to me.

And of course, the easy way out would just be to look for developers. But I can't do that, at least not without significant risk of falling into the "I had an idea for an app, you wanna make it?" brand of parasite. I'd feel dirty doing that, even if I know that I could more or less to front-end and every visual component by myself. In fact, I have done that. It's just the app part that's missing, and that's unfortunately the major lift.

How do you people cope with this? Because it's not been the first time this happened to me. I keep putting off learning 3D modelling out of exactly that reason, that I could just hit a wall no matter how hard I try. It's frustrating, and looking back how easily I picked up other disciplines in university it really makes me wonder if there are some things my brain just can't learn. I don't think I'm ready to accept that.

Edit: For anyone interested, I uploaded the abridged design document to my website.

Oftentimes I find myself feeling overwhelmed when listening to music that speaks to me. I feel vivid imagery cover the landscape in my mind's eye, as if a custom made music video was being created on the spot to accompany the sound.

I encounter a frustrating obstacle when considering how to best translate this surge of inspiration into art. I know exactly what I want to create but feel limited by a lack of experience in animation, modeling, illustration etc. and the time it would take to approximate my vision. Altogether, it becomes discouraging and the idea withers before it has a chance to blossom.

My question to the creatively-minded is this—what strategies are deployed to counteract your self-doubt before it undermines your inspiration?

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Thank you for any wisdom offered. The tildes community is special and dear to my heart ♡

I want to make a game.

... is what I've been telling myself for the past few weeks. Honestly, I might have subconsciously had this thought for the past few months, if not years.

Strange as it sounds, I've gone on a weird mental journey in getting to the point where I'm able to acknowledge this desire. I've always had a vague, constant urge to be creative, but for the past few years, this urge has been tied to an outcome: "I want to write a JS library because it'll make for a cool product later"; something like that. Inevitably, having that outcome in mind makes me set a standard of perfection for what the thing is supposed to be, which makes me start planning every piece of the thing, which... tires me out, and then I just don't do it.

I'd say I've been better about this recently, in that I'll sometimes do one-off things because it seems like fun at the time. Small coding projects that serve no purpose at all. I randomly got into drawing for a week, so the day's drawing for that week. Rediscovering this process has been fun, and it's definitely been fulfilling to just marvel at my work without having to check off boxes for what the thing is supposed to do.

But now, I've got the idea that I want to make a game. A game isn't a small project, or at least not as small as what I've been working on recently. I'm pretty sure my motivation for wanting to do this is entirely intrinsic: I just want to do it, I don't want to sell it, I don't care if nobody plays it. And yet, I'm still finding it pretty hard to do anything.

Firstly, I don't have much time during the week to work on this game; I also work full-time. Second, when I do have time, I find it pretty hard to make any progress. A game isn't small, so I feel the need to plan stuff out, even just roughly. Which is what I do at work. So then it just feels like work. I tire of planning pretty quickly, and I think I've come to conflate this tired feeling with burnout at work, so I just stop and scroll on the internet.

Sometimes I'm able to focus and just write something without planning. It's nice when I'm able to do this, but inevitably I start thinking about the bigger picture... "Okay, the protagonist feels X because the theme I'm going for is Y, which..." and then the planning starts again.

Anyway, this is all a very long way to say that I struggle with creating for creation's sake, partly because budgeting my time as a full-time laborer is hard, and partly because I have trouble seeing the trees for the forest, so to speak. Have you all ever had to deal with this? I'm curious to know what's helped you, or just your thoughts on the topic/my situation.

Cheers!

I am always interested in how creative people express themselves. There is something very I find very relaxing about creating large scale ephemeral art. Every summer I create temporary beach art / typography with seaweed collected from the shoreline.

Couple of examples:
https://imgur.com/gallery/m7xZIvy
https://imgur.com/gallery/vBrlpBz
https://imgur.com/gallery/zYCpDuo
https://imgur.com/gallery/Mw5NIr2

Generally the process involves sketching out the design in the sand, then collecting 3-5, 39 gallon yard bags worth of seaweed. I then slowly trace the design and weave the seaweed into itself and the sand. These projects take about 4 - 8 hours depending on the scarcity of the seaweed and the size of the design. They disappear with in just a few days due to weather and human and animal activity.

So tell me, artists of tildes, what weird stuff do you create?

Edit: words

Time for some inspiration. I've been working on a few SaaS applications for the past 2-3 months, and have only really got into it full time recently, and I'm totally in code-mode now, so I thought I'd ask to see what other people have created in either their spare time, or to earn some money.

Link your app/tool/product/service! What tools, frameworks, or services did you build it with? What does it accomplish? How did you express your creativity while working on it? What's next for what you're creating?

So, a little background, my profession is technical writing. I want to write a novel but I'm struggling a little with getting the creative side of my brain going. Technical writing seems to further inhibit my creativity with all its rules.

I'm looking into local writers' workshops but they're all full at the moment. In the meantime, I was wondering if anyone here has any advice for exercises or things I could do to stimulate my creativity and free my mind from all the rules of technical writing. Thoughts?

I used to work as an artist full-time, and I've learned a few tricks over the years to help me create consistently, even when I don't feel very creative.
I recently read a book called "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield that hit on a lot of what I've discovered and presented a lot more insight on the subject of creating and overcoming blocks.

So I'd love to hear what helps all of you out there stay creative and spark the muse. Are you willing to share your process and approach?

I'm doubling down here folks :) My prior post was called-out for being click-baity and rightfully so. The title was especially poor. I'll try to do better moving forward.

I'm starting a discussion here because my hope is that we can talk about the ideas within the article, rather than the article itself.

Here was the original post for those interested: https://tildes.net/~humanities/3y1/mark_cuban_says_the_ability_to_think_creatively_will_be_critical_in_10_years_and_elon_musk_agrees

I posted the article because at it's core are several interesting observations/propositions from two billionaires, Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, that presumably know a lot about business, and in Musk's case, a lot about STEM, and have a history of making winning bets on the future.

The article supposes that:

• Many (most?) STEM jobs will become automated
• This will happen very quickly; more quickly than we anticipate
• Creative skills will soon become more highly valued than STEM skills

There was a time when parents told their kids to "become a lawyer or a doctor" but after enough time we end up with too many people going into the same profession and there is more competition for those jobs as the market becomes flooded. I know anecdotally that's happened for lawyers (not sure about doctors).

I can see this happening with STEM as well.

Should parents encourage kids to pursue STEM but pair this with equal study in the humanities? Is STEM the next target of automation? Will creative skills be more highly valued? Will engineers find themselves in the bread line?