All You Need Is Your Imagination

I love creating! Actually, that is an understatement. Words alone cannot describe how much I love creating!

I started my journey in the creative field to be an animator, soon to discover, in my junior years, that the demand for animators in Boston wasn’t exactly what I had hoped for. But I also found that I could instead make a buck designing website layouts. Sure, things on the screen didn’t move as much as I wanted them to; in fact, they didn’t move at all most of the time, but hey, I was able to pay the bills while doing something I loved. And at the same time learning more about design every day.

Over the years, as I was learning, practicing, and building things, I had to use various tools, including Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Sketch, Figma, Framer, etc.; the list went on and on.

That continued until the recent years when I stumbled upon an old but fascinating article about how constraints can inspire creativity. “Six regular eight-stud Lego bricks can be put together in more than 900,000,000 different ways.” said the article.

That sentence kept me thinking. Looking back at my past, I realized that my most successful projects had been the ones that had many constraints in place. There is something incredible about constraints as they force you to think outside the box.

It hit me, right there and then! What if I applied that same concept to the same set of tools I used to create? What if I downsized and stuck only to the essentials? After all, the principles of creating something from nothing were still there, regardless of the toolset. And that was all I needed to convince myself to cancel a few subscriptions and go back to the basics.

Everything has been a progression ever since. I become a full stack designer, a Creative Director and ultimately found my own Creative Agency but this principle remains.

It’s a system that we apply religiously at Algert to this day, and what allows our design team to create work that truly stands out, and since we love to share, here are our Lego bricks:

Figma

Figma doesn’t need an introduction. It has been a designer favorite for the last couple of years, and it is ideal for any type or creative work starting with visuals design, product design, illustration and even print. Oh, and let’s not leave out the best part, the real-time collaboration feature.

Screenflow

The fastest way to create quality video content, and even GIFs.

Motion 5

If you love animation, you’ll love Motion 5; it’s the ease of use and price.

Sublime Text

The text editor that talks the talk and walks the walk.

In Conclusion

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
― Albert Einstein

As designers, we do not need an abundance of tools to create quality work, nor spend time obsessing over the latest and greatest features of every app we stubble upon, as we DO possess the most potent part of all―our imagination!

So go ahead, simplify! Let your imagination take over, not your toolset.

Thank you for reading.