My Creative Process: Simplify Before You Decorate
People sometimes assume a creative director’s process starts with a burst of visual inspiration, a moodboard, a color palette, a big aesthetic idea. Mine doesn’t. When I take on a project, the first thing I reach for isn’t a paintbrush. It’s a set of questions about structure. The visual work comes later, and it comes out better because of what happens before it. Here’s how I actually work.
First, I figure out what’s really wrong
Almost every project starts with an existing experience that isn’t working, and the useful first move is to understand why. I look at what feels confusing, generic, fragmented, outdated, or visually weak, and I try to separate the symptoms from the cause. A page might feel cluttered, but the real problem is that it’s trying to do three jobs. A brand might feel generic, but the real issue is that it has no consistent system holding it together.
This diagnostic step matters because it’s easy to treat the symptom and miss the disease. If I jumped straight to making things prettier, I’d be decorating a structure that’s still broken underneath. So before I design anything, I want to know what’s actually going wrong and why.
Then I understand the goal and the constraints
Design that ignores the business is just art. So before I touch the visuals, I want to understand what the business is trying to achieve, who the audience really is, what limits I’m working within, and what action the experience is supposed to drive. Those aren’t constraints on the creative work. They’re the brief for it. A design decision that looks great but pulls against the business goal isn’t a good design decision, no matter how nice it looks.
This is also where I get honest about compliance, budget, technical realities, and anything else that shapes what’s possible. Knowing the real constraints up front means I design within them from the start instead of falling in love with something that can’t ship.
Then, and only then, I simplify before I decorate
Here’s the step that gives this post its title, and the one I’d most want another designer to take from my process. Before I make anything look good, I make the structure make sense. I simplify.
That means establishing a clear content hierarchy and page flow. Giving each page one clear job and making sure every section earns its place. Cutting or demoting whatever competes with what actually matters. This is the least glamorous part of the process and the most important, because a strong structure makes the visual work easy, and a weak structure makes it impossible. You cannot decorate your way out of a page that doesn’t know what it’s for.
Only once the structure is sound do I move into the visual direction, and by then a lot of the hard decisions are already made. The design has a clear job to express, so the aesthetics have something real to serve instead of a void to fill.
Then I develop a direction that fits the real industry
When I do get to the visual layer, I’m looking for a direction that fits the actual industry and audience, not a surface-level trend. I’d rather a brand feel authentic to the people it’s speaking to than fashionable for a season. Trends age. Authenticity holds. And in specialized industries, an audience can tell instantly whether a brand understands their world, so getting the direction right matters more than getting it current.
This is also where I decide what needs custom work, redrawing assets that are low-resolution or generic, building graphics that can extend across the experience, and where existing pieces can be reused. The goal is always a system, not a pile of one-offs, so I’m thinking about how each strong idea can repeat and scale even as I’m first making it.
Then I refine across contexts and explain the reasoning
The last stretch is refinement. I review the experience across desktop and mobile as genuinely different contexts, not one squeezed into the other. I sharpen the copy and interface language so they support the brand and the user’s journey. And I make a point of communicating the reasoning behind the changes, because stakeholders should understand that the decisions are intentional, not arbitrary. A design people understand is a design people trust and maintain.
The takeaway
My process is iterative, visual, and hands-on, but it doesn’t start with the visuals. It starts with diagnosis, then goals, then simplification, and only then decoration. Simplify before you decorate isn’t a slogan for me. It’s the actual order of operations, and it’s the reason the visual work, when it finally arrives, has something solid to stand on.
The prettiest version of a broken structure is still broken. Get the structure right first, and the beauty has somewhere to live.
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