On Creative Constraints

[holland]

Due to the nature of creativity, it's often helpful to add artifical constraints to the creative process. These restrictions help to break up our default pattern recognition that can otherwise trap us into the same old tropes, force us to find creative solutions to get around their limitations, and allow us to discover unique combinations of seemingly unrelated ideas we wouldn't have thought to mix.

Besides their benefits to creativity, creative restrictions also have a variety of practical benefits in terms of design skills and project management. By abstracting down our options into limited design palettes, we can maintain visual consistency, reduce the cognitive load (and literal workload) of our artists, manage the scope at different stages of the process, and have a greater sense of clarity in what we are trying to accomplish.

Creative constraints can be considered a form of data validation that is usually applied at the start of a process and used to guide it. You could also argue that data validation is a type of creative constraint or that they are synonyms. But the underlying concepts are a bit different, and data validation can take forms that aren't necessarily tied to creative expression.