Endless Scrolling, Broken Links, and Wasted Hours: The Creative Concepting Trap
Every creative project starts the same way: a spark of an idea, a vague direction, and a need to visually communicate an early concept. And so, the search begins. We comb through Pinterest, Behance, Dribbble, Instagram, Google, and our own saved archives, hunting for the right references to convey tone, style, and aesthetic direction. What should be an exciting part of the creative process quickly turns into a black hole of endless scrolling, broken links, and format conversions.
Creative concepting is meant to be an inspirational exercise, but in reality, it can be one of the most time-consuming and frustrating aspects of the design process. We start every project by losing hours searching, collecting, organizing, formatting, and presenting references before we’ve even started designing. And the worst part? This cycle repeats itself as soon as we onboard the next project. The inefficiency isn’t just an annoyance—it’s a productivity drain that forces us into risk-averse, familiar solutions rather than pushing creative boundaries. When the first step of every project feels like a crisis to solve, innovation takes a backseat to damage control.
Why is Creative Concepting Such a Pain?
Finding the Right References is a Time Sink
Gathering reference images isn’t just about picking pretty pictures. It’s about finding the right images that communicate an idea clearly. This means sifting through thousands of visuals, sometimes across multiple platforms, with no centralized way to search. We often resort to makeshift methods like saving images to local folders, bookmarking links, or creating chaotic Pinterest boards that become unmanageable over time.
File Formats and Image Quality Issues
Ever found the perfect reference, only to realize it’s a low-resolution screenshot or locked behind a paywall? Or worse—downloaded a WebP file that can’t be opened in Photoshop? These small roadblocks add up, taking us out of our creative flow and into a technical rabbit hole of file conversions and workarounds. The frustration of fixing these issues outweighs the excitement of exploration, making concepting feel more like a problem to solve than a phase of discovery.
Turning a Collection of Images into a Cohesive Presentation
Even after finding great references, the real challenge begins: formatting them into a presentable mood board. Whether it's using Figma, InDesign, or Google Slides, we have to manually place, align, and format our references in a way that looks polished and professional. This is especially painful when feedback leads to endless revisions and rearrangements. Instead of refining ideas, we’re stuck adjusting layouts and troubleshooting export settings—again, more time spent fixing rather than creating.
The Process is Repetitive and Inefficient
Creative concepting isn’t a one-time task. It happens at the start of nearly every project, and sometimes multiple times within a single project as creative direction shifts. That means we are repeatedly spending hours redoing the same tedious steps instead of actually designing. And because inefficiency breeds frustration, we’re often more motivated to fix the broken process than to explore better ways of working. This cycle of loss aversion—where we take action only when the pain is unbearable—keeps designers stuck in outdated workflows.
How Ideate is Fixing This
We believe that designers should spend more time creating and less time managing operational tasks. That’s why we’re releasing a tool to streamline the entire creative concepting process, including:
A Creative Concepting Aggregator that pulls in references from multiple platforms into one organized space.
Auto-Formatting Tools that instantly generate polished, client-ready concept boards.
Smart Organization that allows designers to tag, categorize, and search their references effortlessly.
Drag-and-Drop Functionality to quickly arrange and update boards without rebuilding them from scratch.
In-Line Commenting that enables designers to add comments directly on the board, calling out specific elements of their references for review, streamlining collaboration and feedback.
When concepting workflows are streamlined, designers can shift their mindset from fixing broken processes to exploring creative possibilities. This shift is crucial—not just for efficiency, but for producing better, more inspired work.
Creative concepting should be an inspiring, exploratory exercise—not an operational burden. With Ideate, designers can reclaim their time and focus on what truly matters: bringing their vision to life.
If you’re tired of wasting hours on creative concepting, join our waitlist at ideatebetter.com and be the first to experience the future of design operations.