The Project That Taught Me to take a break
November 05, 2025
A story about the Designer rebellion of slowing down - how one project, one deadline, and one exhausted team taught me that creativity doesn’t grow from pressure,it grows from break off.
01
The Project’s Weight
It started with an email from Atelier 9 Nine - a design studio known for projects that shape how people see the world.
They wanted me to lead the visual identity for “Global”, a sustainability campaign for a global wellness brand.
A project where success was supposed to lead them to significant progress. It was the kind of project that could define a career and provide a lot for the team. Our small team - Leo on UX, Elias on motion, and me on design direction - dove in headfirst.
Although the team was well prepared, every day felt like proof that we belonged here. Every night felt like a test that we might fail.
Deadlines were approaching, and meetings were multiplying. The word “revision” lost its meaning.
I stopped going out, forgot to reply to friends, and convinced myself that break could wait.
02
The Breaking Point
Two days before our presentation, the design walls were full but my mind was empty.
Every prototype blurred into the next. The logo didn’t feel alive — it felt tired, like me.
Elias tried to lighten the mood, cracking a joke about how we’d aged five years in one sprint.
No one laughed.
That night, I stayed behind alone. The office lights hummed softly, the cursor blinked and i was very tired.
I fell asleep at my desk. When I woke, there was a sticky note on my tablet written in Leo’s looping handwriting:
“You don’t have to earn break.”
It didn’t feel like advice. It felt like permission.
03
Rediscovering
The next morning, I didn’t open the laptop.
I opened my balcony door.
I spent the weekend offline walking through the city, cooking slow meals, watching light spill across the walls of my apartment.
It felt strange at first, like I was skipping class. But slowly, something softened.
By Sunday, ideas began to hum again. Not loud - but steady.
04
The Project Reborn
When Monday came, I got the team together early.
We scrapped half of the presentation.
We kept only the solution that felt honest to me.
The final version of Global wasn’t the sleek, high-gloss design we had originally envisioned.
It was calm. Spacious. Grounded.
The white space became the hero—a visual space between ideas.
We finished on time. The client loved the end result.
But I knew the real success had come before, during the weekend break.
05
The Lesson
The project ended, the campaign launched, and we moved on to new work.
But something stayed with me:
Break isn’t the opposite of ambition.
It’s what keeps it alive.
Because sometimes, the bravest thing a designer can do is to step away — and let the work breath with them.
Break isn’t a retreat from creation —
it’s where creation rediscovers its pulse.
