How to get your creative work back on track

Hi! Dan here. How do you get unstuck on a project that you've left on the shelf for too long? It's so hard: you pick it up and you want so badly to start working on it again. But you can't quite bring yourself to get started because you don't even know how to begin. That's what today's essay from artist and designer Coleen Baik is all about. She teaches us how to make a "Whats' Next" deck—a collection of slides that can help you reestablish the context for your creative work, and pick up that project you’ve left on the shelf for so long. I hope you enjoy it!

When the pandemic hit NYC last March, I quietly set aside the animation I’d been working on. In fact, I all but stopped making art.

It was almost shocking how fluidly I went from 60 to 0 almost overnight. One day I was fully engaged in a fast and familiar routine. The next, I… just wasn’t. And I didn’t fight it. It felt natural, and yet inverse, somehow—like going back into the womb.

After the 2020 U.S. presidential elections and the rollout of the vaccines, I began to feel myself waking back up. There were small signals, like the tingling of nerves when a sleeping limb becomes sensate again: I found myself thinking about the animated short I had long set aside, wanting to finish it, put it out into the world, begin something else.

After almost a year of unplanned pause, this is the exercise I did to help me get back in the groove. What anchored it was a deck of slides, of all things—something that seems incredibly unpoetic and mundane for something so consequential and momentous.

And yet, I can’t emphasize enough how powerful and effective this work was in getting me re-oriented and back to speed. It helped me kick loose from a rut and jumpstart my next chapter.

I include a link at the end to a template in case you choose to explore something like this, yourself.

I began methodically with questions and provocations, owing perhaps to my decades-long career as a designer. I used Keynote to organize my thoughts, an app with which I explored product stories and created quick and dirty prototypes as a designer at Twitter many years ago. It’s a versatile tool with powerful transitional and bitmap-handling capabilities.