Es Devlin’s 5 Tips for a More Creative Life

Widely considered one of the most influential stage designers alive, Es Devlin has created abstract, ethereal, and conceptually dazzling sets for the likes of Louis Vuitton, Britain’s Royal Opera House, and the Olympic Games, as well as for English singer-songwriter Adele, Canadian singer, songwriter, and producer the Weeknd, and other powerhouse performers. Es draws inspiration from architecture, literature, modern art, classical theater, and contemporary design to build psychologically gripping experiences that drastically expand the realm of possibilities on stage.

Es Devlin’s artwork and designs are a testament to her larger creative philosophies, which cannot be contained to a single mode or medium. These five tips from Es can help you embrace your creativity:

1. 1. See the bigger picture. Throughout her decades-long career, Es has learned when to modify her work, when to push back, and when to move on. And because she’s often working with sprawling teams and complex budgets, she’s also learned how to adapt to changing circumstances. It’s okay to swap materials or alter the aesthetics of a work, “so long as it communicates the same gesture.”
2. 2. Own your ideas. When working with teams, Es finds that people are willing to trust her if she trusts herself. Accordingly, she always approaches her team with a strong conviction in her ideas. “They smell confidence and uncertainty and fear,” Es says of creative collaborators. “If you’re scared, it’s really hard to take anyone with you. Present what you really want to do. There will be enough people who want to dilute your idea; don’t do it to yourself.”
3. 3. Solve problems like an artist. When Es was designing a 65-foot-high mechanical figure for the English band Take That, she was told by three engineers that the set piece was technically impossible to build. Undeterred, she eventually found a hydraulic machine specialist who could breathe life into the ambitious animatronic using a long hydraulic spine. The only catch? The figure was controlled by electronics that had to remain intact and thus had to be intricately folded onto a flatbed truck before it could be transported beneath multiple bridges across continental Europe—including one with an annoyingly low clearance in Hamburg, Germany. In the end, though, the set piece was one of Es’s most technically dazzling: an animatronic wonder that wowed thousands of people.
4. 4. Use failure as a motivator. Disappointment is inextricable from the work of an artist. Es even describes the uncomfortable feeling as one of her prime motivators. “You can feel, when you sit in the audience, when the audience is getting it or not getting it,” she said in an online lecture for the London Design Festival. “There’s nothing worse than having made a piece of communication for an audience and the loud sound of them failing to understand what you were trying to communicate. The humiliation of that is one of the main drivers of my practice.”
5. 5. Remain curious. A beginner’s outlook can help you view potential setbacks as learning opportunities while driving you to improve your craft. As you get better, remember that you can only know a fraction of what’s possible and that immersing yourself in something new is a reward unto itself. “You can never research enough,” Es says. “Your life will be an endless, fruitful journey of not knowing enough.”

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