Dear designers, perfectionism is killing your creativity.

When details become a burden

As designers, our craft revolves around details. We naturally care about how every pixel sits, how every shadow looks, how that one stroke looks better with 1.5 thickness rather than 2, the list goes on. But lately, I’ve been realizing just how heavy that perfectionism can get. And not in a good way.

I’ve caught myself spending hours on small details that no one would ever notice. Whether it’s making sure every single element is perfectly aligned to a 4px grid (or even obsessively tweaking drop shadows to fit that exact numerical system), I sometimes lose track of the bigger picture.

And while it’s good to care about the craft, it can become overwhelming. Trying to “perfect” everything, even things behind the scenes like layer naming, or organizing your screens in a specific order, builds up unnecessary anxiety.

No matter how much time you spend chasing it, perfection is unreachable. And the pursuit of it quietly eats away at something even more important: creativity.

How perfectionism kills creativity

When you obsess over every rule, every grid, every clean handoff Figma file from the very beginning, you stop allowing yourself to think freely.

You stop exploring crazy ideas. You stop pushing boundaries. You start designing for rules, not for people.

It’s something I’ve been struggling with lately: instead of creating bold, interesting work first, I find myself worrying if everything will fit perfectly into a system. And this doesn’t just slow me down. It kills the creative momentum before it even starts.

Comparison makes it worse too. You look at other designers, you see incredible work, and you start doubting yourself. You start questioning every decision, even when what you had was already good. You waste hours chasing something “better” that maybe didn’t even need fixing.

It’s a cycle that drains time, energy, and motivation.

Creativity first. Systems second.

This experience made me realize: the job of a designer isn’t to get the grids right from the start. It’s to be creative. To break the norm. To find something new.

Good practices, clean files, pixel-perfect alignments, all of that should come after the creative process. Once you’ve landed the concept, once you’ve figured out the soul of the design, then you can (and should) organize it properly.

But if you start by trying to make everything neat and systemized, you’ll end up killing the very thing that makes your design meaningful.

There’s a lot of debate around the likes of auto-layouts for this reason. I personally love auto-layout and I am addicted to it. But I can clearly see how it can restrict creativity when used too much too early.

Two creators I follow and really admire, Ilya and Fons, have often pointed this out. And Fons once said something that really stuck with me:

And honestly I couldn’t agree more.

If you’re a designer struggling with this too, here’s what I’m trying to remind myself:

• Stop chasing perfection — not visually, not behind the scenes. It will never be “perfect.” And that’s okay.

• Stop wasting hours polishing invisible details that no one cares about. They don’t make your work better if they kill your sanity.

• Focus on building great ideas first. Bring the wild concepts to life.

• Worry about organizing and systemizing after the creative work is done.

Design is, above everything else, a creative process. You’re not a machine. You’re a creator. Start messy if you need to. Explore. Build something worth cleaning up later.