This week I’ve been thinking a lot about the design work process and how to really get creative juices flowing. The thing that I realized is that almost every time that I work on a project or design, I listen to music.

I really started listening to a lot of music when I started college because when you start living in a dorm you have to find ways to concentrate and kind of make a bubble. So you start to learn how to do a lot of stuff while listening to music. Whenever I had a design project due, the first thing I would do was to pick what music I wanted to listen to.

There is something about music that can really put you in the mood of the design. For me, listening to cool music really helps to keep up my confidence while designing. Sometimes it’s also the thing that just allows you to create rather than thinking too much about a design.

I think this reasoning is a lot of the reason why I like to design song lyrics and why I liked designing the “music analogy” project in our Visual Concepts class last year. We had to choose a song without lyrics and illustrate it. At first I was really nervous because it sounded so out of my comfort zone. But, I ended up enjoying the project a lot.

So the next time you feel stuck or not confident while designing, just pop in your earbuds and turn your music up.

P.S A little bit of dancing seems to help too!