Design cooldowns.

Sharing your creativity is inherently risky. People may reject what you've created, judge you personally, or simply misunderstand your intent. Bold creative work demands the psychological safety to fail more often than you succeed. Simply putting talented creatives in a room together guarantees nothing. Great ideas emerge from people who feel genuinely connected and free to collaborate without fear. As designers, we often forget to stretch our most important muscle: creativity. It doesn't appear magically, and it will atrophy under the weight of repetitive work. Nurturing creativity requires space to explore, safety to experiment and fail, and fresh constraints that spark innovation. Every other week for one hour, the Hightouch design team gathers to play, laugh, and iterate. We rotate ownership so everyone can facilitate their exercise of choice—whether teaching a new skill, introducing a fresh tool, or challenging the team to create something wonderfully silly and useless. Sometimes our work directly serves the business: brainstorming t-shirts for events or building moodboards for new brand directions. More often, we create just for ourselves—and that's exactly the point. See examples at cooldown.club