Creative blocks are sometimes difficult to overcome, when they’re your own. Someone else’s creative blocks can be a bit trickier. Open your teammate’s mind and remove their blocker often requires a work-around.

The Challenge

A client recently experienced a responsive-design challenge in the 990px - 599px (small-desktop/tablet-to-mobile breakpoint). The issue was that the menu-items were wrapping, an aesthetically undesired look.

The fun part

It was a late-work-night and when engaging the client-xd in the design charrette, the client-xd didn’t yet have the answer to our challenge and wasn’t yet willing to draw.

I offered some soft advice:

Here’s a marker. Draw it wrong.

huh?

Draw something wrong. Something that you know isn’t a functional solution.

A few rounds of ‘drawing it wrong’ turned into drawing it right (even pulling from the ‘wrong’ ideas)… we finally came to a functional solution.

I once heard Bill Buxton say,

I don’t care if I come up with the worst ideas in the room; I just want to be in the room. Often the worst ideas point out everything that is wrong, which helps you see what is truly right.

So right.