Limiting Your Tools Makes You a Better Designer

Are these limitations helping you be more creative?

— Exactly. It’s the most critical part. With any kind of creative work you start disabling as much as possible and narrow it down only to the necessary tools you need, and from there start making the work. That’s what I believe makes you super creative.

Constraints can be liberating. When you're doing creative work, the total space of all possibilities is so vast that it’s unworkable. You have to carve off one tiny little sector, and think inside the box. The same is true when you zoom out to the scale of an entire life, but this is not obvious until all the constraints are removed: you don’t know

Good tools do not add features and more options to what we already have, but help to reduce distractions from the main work, which here is thinking.

When there are no material, time, and budget constraints, you have unlimited options. When you accept limitations, your range of choices is reduced. Whether imposed by design or by necessity, it’s helpful to see limitations as opportunities.