When it comes to the idea of “performance” as it relates to graphic design and creativity there are many dimensions. Performance is not just about doing good work. It’s about the totality of what performance really means across creation, behavior, and dialogue; your skills, your aesthetic, your role, and your interactions with others. In this article, I try to unpack design performance to better understand how we might improve ourselves professionally and artistically and to see what we can do to help us become “Total Creatives.”

Performance as Creative Act

The craft of design, or any creative endeavor for that matter, is the aesthetic performance that defines the caliber of your creative ability. Call it skills, chops, talent, or style. This is your creative signature. This is the outward performance that defines the work you create and it is the performance through which your talent is evaluated by others.

If you are very self-critical like I am, creative performance is a personal battle to create something that is better than your last creative effort. How you make things and the inner monologue you use to evaluate how good or beautiful or logical an idea becomes is the mysterious thing that makes what you create uniquely yours.

No matter how educated or experienced you are, the creative act always possesses a degree of unknown magic — or at least magical thinking. No matter how hard you plan and strategize, any number of things can transpire that you did not expect both good and bad. One only needs to listen to Dylan’s Basement Tapes to realize that most of what we see as a perfect creative product actually requires a messy and imperfect path of iteration and trial and error to come to life. Despite the unknowns, each one of us works to define and refine our creative process. This process is the series of steps you take to create something out of nothing. Having a process is a way of providing logic to our creative acts so that we can better evaluate what we do and so we don’t go crazy along the way.

Having a process is not about having an answer. It is merely about having a place to begin so that you can find an answer through the act of making. The most important aspect of “Performance as Creative Act” is to embrace your ability while also giving yourself over to where an idea takes you. As a creator, you are as much an author of your work as you are a catalyst to bring it forth so the work has a life of its own. You must accept and embrace that things will inevitably not turn out how you had originally envisioned and that your work will go on to do things you never expected. Your creative acts will bear fruit and take you where they need to go.

Tips when thinking about Performance as Creative Act

1. If you are not happy with something don’t present it. It’s nearly impossible to defend something you don’t believe in.
2. As my dad always says to me; “Make a plan and work the plan.” It’s ok if the plan changes but always have a plan to start from.
3. Stick with a process until you understand the output. Don’t abandon a way of working until you know for sure it’s not working.
4. Trust the magic. Give the things you did not expect room to breathe. They may surprise you.

Performance as Persona

The part you play in the context of your professional efforts is your Performance as Persona. You may be performing as an intern, a project manager, a creative director, partner, senior designer, artist, writer, strategist, and the like. Your persona is how people identify and understand your role, expertise, contribution, and accountability for any project or output.

It is important to understand what others expect of your persona. Your ability to execute the skills that are expected of you are table stakes when thinking about Performance as Persona. Like creative talent, the skills of your persona must be expressed at the highest level. Regardless of the project role, I’m a stickler for attention to detail, craft, and clarity of communication. All of us can learn to do almost anything but once you put on the proverbial uniform of your persona, you must demonstrate and deliver as the expert responsible for what you are expected to do. No amateurs allowed.

The second aspect of your Performance as Persona is the personality and vernacular of your role. For example, business people used to always wear suits because that is what business people were expected to look like. We expect a president to be presidential, a technologist to be fluent in technology and a creative director to be creative and mentoring. The delivery of your persona through your behavior and appearance can take on any number of caricatures or archetypes designed to reinforce the work you do and how people perceive you.

As an example, I have been in meetings where the creative lead was a “cool” person that wore a lot of black and had tattoos, or on another occasion they had kooky glasses and weird sneakers and were very goofy. Another CD came off as a Southern California stoner type wearing Birkenstocks and cut-offs and had an easy-going demeanor. All of these creatives had individual personas that were away for that person to say through their behavior and aesthetic, ”hey, I’m the creative person and it’s okay if I look and act like this in this meeting because I am creative and that is what you expect of me in my role.”

I’ve seen this kind of creative role-playing work really well to disarm and make people feel more at ease in a meeting and I have also seen it backfire. In the past I’ve attempted to be “the creative “funny guy” by being self-deprecating and humorous in a meeting in an effort to lighten the tone and make things less stressful or serious. One of my “moves” has been to make a joke at just the right time in a meeting to give everyone a chuckle and relieve the tension. Over the years I’ve done this to great effect but one time it came off horribly.

I read the room wrong and was more interested in my joke (reinforcing my persona) and was not self aware of the people I was speaking to. Some folks in the meeting laughed but a few were very offended. Some members of my team let me know and I was mortified. My persona had gotten in the way and I learned a big lesson about knowing when to express personality and knowing when to take it down a few notches. It can be a fine line. Your persona can be a strength that helps you clarify and deliver on your role and work, however, too much personality can be like too much sriracha — it will ruin the meal.

Tips when thinking about Performance as Persona

1. When it comes to your work life, be yourself but be self-aware. The worst thing you can do is be inauthentic and false. The second worst thing is to have no filter.
2. Being the best at your job is infinitely more important than being “cool” at your job. Substance always wins over the surface.
3. Be humble, be real and always lead with decorum. We are all in this together.
4. Always take the high road. Petty conflict and bluster has no place at work and will never lead to productive outcomes. Just bad vibes.

Performance as Collaboration

For the most part, we all work in teams and have to delegate responsibilities. When it comes to collaboration we all have to fight the impulse to believe that our idea is the right one and that our opinion is the most important. Our default setting as individuals is to put ourselves at the center of our universe, however, humans are fundamentally social animals and we are equally wired to work together.

Performance as Collaboration centers on how we give the floor to others and how we defer to someone else’s idea or solutions and ideally support them with the same level of passion as if their ideas were our own. One way people do this is through formality and courtesy. It’s why senators and congressmen are so cordial to each other during heated debate. Decorum and etiquette provide collaborators with rules to help put the focus on the problem being solved and not the people solving it.

A simple example of this is stopping and letting someone else speak on a Zoom call so that you do not over-talk one another. This behavior seems trivial on the surface yet it embodies a performative level of rational and emotional intelligence that gives everyone an equal place within the dialogue and solutions being discussed. Building off of the decorum of dialogue, Performance as Collaboration is also about empowering others to arrive at solutions on their own and to offer them to the group. As I have mentioned in previous articles, for me collaboration is not as much about working “together” as it is working “alongside” while cheering each other on. When we collaborate we are all contributing our own ingredients to the proverbial creative gumbo and this requires that you chop your own vegetables and do our own work that is then added to the pot.

Successful collaboration is a circular process where everyone has a voice at the table while also allowing space for individual work and collective reconciliation. When done right, Performance as Collaboration can build the great pyramids, send rovers to Mars, and build great businesses and brands.

Tips when thinking about Performance as Collaboration

1. Everyone must have room to shine. Give everyone their moment.
2. Always ask a question from which the right answer can be arrived. Try not to volunteer the answer. Give people the power to arrive at it on their own.
3. If someone’s solution is better, let it be and support it unfettered. Don’t try to muck it up by adding your little mark to an idea just to make you feel like part of it is yours.

Performance as Mentorship

Performance as Mentorship is about how you teach others and pass on knowledge. My training as a young designer did not feel like warm fuzzy mentorship. It was more like Rocky and Mickey in the Rocky movies. It was emotional. It was ego driven. There was a fight to push through the graphic design pain, throw things away that you spent days on and doing things over and over again until they worked. It was boot-camp-like, tough and unpleasant. I learned for sure but it was a struggle partially of my own making.

For me, graphic design graduate school was a trial by fire amongst my peers where the primary defense and offense were about creating really great formal work backed up by lucid and articulate argument to ensure that no one could poke a hole in your idea. Critiques were part debate team, part verbal strategy, and part formal pyrotechnics. The goal was to put in more time, create better, more beautiful and powerful work that was more rationally resolved than your peers. At least that is what my 23 year old brain thought then.

Over time I have found that the tactics of pointing out weaknesses and leveraging your emotions to push your work and the work of others can be unhealthy and counterproductive especially when it comes to mentorship. There is a fine line between pushing to be better and just making yourself or others frustrated and upset. Again, our default setting is to be right even if we are not. Mentorship at its core is about letting go of right and wrong entirely and to focus your energy on asking the right questions.

Performance as Mentorship in its true form is about giving someone the tools to both think and execute at their best. You are a catalyst helping others to arrive at their own ideas. You may provide them with information they do not have or a way of creatively evaluating something they had not considered. I have found that to be a good mentor you must perform the role of the sensei by asking the right questions to elicit productive creative thinking and solutions. As a mentor, you are performing an actively passive role. Each designer must provide their own answers and act upon them how they see fit. As a creative mentor, you need to be more of a Mr. Miyagi or Cus D’Amato than Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket. That said, Performance as Mentorship should help surface tensions and identify creative blind spots. Some degree of struggle means a person is growing and that is a good thing.

Tips when thinking about Performance as Mentorship

1. Don’t hesitate to provide criticism but don’t be mean about it. Back up your critique with information that can facilitate better ideas.
2. “I don’t like it” is the most useless feedback you can ever provide someone. As a mentor, a person is not designing for your taste or point of view. They are designing for the best project outcome.
3. You are a catalyst whose job is to bring out the best in another person. Always remember, what you are doing is educating someone so that they can become far better than you are.

Performance as Journey

Becoming a more holistic designer and creative is a lifelong journey. As you grow and evolve you come to find that your performance is all about how all of the dimensions of your talent, process, behavior and interactions work to support and reinforce one another. To understand and begin to master these interrelationships requires both self-awareness and openness. Your inner battles will always be churning just below the surface and it is our job to be cognisant of how we show up to work and life so that we can make how our actions and decisions affect our work and each other more productive.

Ultimately, optimizing your Creative Performance is about choosing what and how to think and then acting upon it with passion and commitment. The more productive and optimistic our mindset the longer our creative health and stamina will be. When it comes to creativity you must be a long distance runner. As a designer you have to strengthen your creative muscles and this will require exercise, pain and sisyphean repetition. This is unavoidable if you want to grow and be better.

When it comes to optimizing your creative performance, the key thing to remember is that every day is a new day in your journey to be the best version of you. If you love what you do you will forever be at war with your own mind and to forge ahead you must have an inner psychology of strength, outward humility and a drive to move forward. You have to remind yourself that only you have command over your “Total Performance” as a creative person and the rest is to a large extent beyond your control.

Tips when thinking about Performance as Journey

1. It’s ok to be hard on yourself but take it easy too. To be really good at something does not happen overnight. It takes a lot of wrong to get to the right.
2. Read, look and absorb the world around you. You can never be too informed when it comes to your own creativity. The more information and inspiration you can pull from the better.
3. Keep moving forward no matter where your journey takes you. Face your own resistance head on and push through. When you look back it will all make sense. When you are in the middle of it, dig in and focus on the now.

Reading List

While thinking about the topic of Create Performance, I have found the following incredibly inspirational and insightful.

Check out Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art and Turning Pro. Both of these books are really great reads. Also check out Lex Fridman’s interview with Steven here. David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life is an inspiration for how it distills down the essence of living.