The Joy of Pointless Creativity

In an industry defined by client briefs and measurable outcomes, it’s easy to forget the simple thrill of making something purely for the sake of it. Maybe it’s the mindless doodling you fill your notebooks with. A scrapbook of memories you’re documenting. Or silly videos you’re making with a friend. Whatever it may be, a “pointless” project can be a place for your creativity to be fully let loose, without judgement or pressure.

Here, LBB’s Sunna Coleman rounds up a selection of fun side projects from creatives across advertising to inspire creativity without inhibition.

Renée Jacobi, digital motion director at Daylight

Playful creativity and I have never really gotten along. I’m wildly competitive, which means if I’m not instantly brilliant at something, I usually decide it’s stupid and storm off. But lately, after too many evenings despising the sight of a screen and feeling creatively cooked, I started The Artist’s Way. A 12-week workbook that’s basically a cult I’ve happily joined (my friends have banned me from talking about it).

For one of the weeks you’re not allowed to consume any media. No news, no socials, no Netflix, not even books! It was harrowing. Evenings stretched on like a bad meditation retreat, so I started making stuff. A felt hat for my dog. Some wobbly hand-coiled mugs. Figure drawings. The start of a screenplay I’ll probably never finish.

None of it was great – which, frankly, made me itchy, but it was also weirdly freeing. Now, 10 weeks deep, instead of doom-scrolling or watching another true-crime doc about a woman in 50 pieces, I’m actually creating again. My brain feels lighter, my ideas sharper, and I’ve remembered that pointless creativity might just be the point.

Ally Westwood, creative director at Seed

I made my own paint-by-numbers kit using old illustrations and artwork I’d created over the years. I raided my digital archive, picked a few favourites, stripped them back to outlines, and printed them out to paint by hand.

It started as a small side project as a way to beat the Sunday scaries during a pretty heavy creative block and ended up being exactly what I needed. There’s something really grounding about stepping away from a screen and doing something purely physical: just colour, texture, and time.

It reminded me of an article I read on Nicer Tuesdays on how easily our dependency on screens can dull creativity; constant digital stimulation doesn’t leave much room for the kind of boredom that fuels deeper thinking, curiosity, or that lovely unstructured play where imagination actually sparks. Sitting there, painting my own lines proved it. I rediscovered the joy of creating without purpose, and it completely cleared my creative block.

Saskia Jury, client lead at true digital

Over the past year I’ve been performing in a cover band – namely, Bristol’s best (only?) Chappell Roan cover band, ‘Pink Phony Club’. It started innocently with some singing lessons; to give myself a hobby, a creative outlet, and a way to build my confidence. I’m still not sure how it evolved into performing to 200 people at The Exchange.

It’s involved gathering a band of incredibly talented musicians to perform with, honing my drag make up skills (including eyebrow blocking, which I’m very proud of), creating costumes out of various niche Vinted finds, and become a pseudo creative director – curating the performance itself and working with my bassist to design and print stickers to sell at our shows.

On the surface it feels pointless – we don’t plan on doing this professionally. But it’s brought me so much silly, creative joy and allows me to flex quite a lot of professional skills. I’m pleasantly surprised when I think about what we’ve achieved within a year – playing three gigs to hundreds of people at a time, donating all of our sticker income to a local charity, and getting really lovely feedback after every gig. I can 100% recommend chasing something silly and fun like this!

Ian O'Connor, copywriter at SuperHeroes NYC

At SuperHeroes, our mission is to save the world from boring advertising. So what’s the most pointless creative thing we’ve done lately? Enter the Janklet. This bold ankle jewelry, with handcrafted brass bells, lets New Yorkers strut confidently while keeping rats at bay. No brief, no client, just the joy of making something funny, useful, and entirely our own.

But the Janklet wasn’t a one-off. For the past few years, we’ve been building on our ongoing “Saving NYC From…” series, tackling the city’s problems with small, delightful, unnecessary inventions. We created the Smell Stoppers, a portable device to help New Yorkers survive whatever mysterious scents drifted their way. And during peak election stress, we installed a punching bag outside our office, inviting anyone to release a little tension before voting.

Across all these experiments, from street interviews to spontaneous photo moments, the series has become a creative sandbox, allowing us to try bold concepts and rediscover that the best work comes from curiosity, humour and the simple pleasure of creating.

So as the year winds down, here’s a challenge: make something for no reason, other than it makes you smile. Sometimes that’s exactly what the industry, and your energy, needs.

Charlie Blower, managing partner and co-founder at Blak Labs

The most pointless thing I’ve done recently? Walk backwards. From the agency, down the corridor, into the lift, to the sandwich shop. And back. All under the astonished gaze of passersby who probably thought I’d finally lost it.

It looks ridiculous, like something you’d only do after losing a bet, or worse, winning one. But I was on a mission. Research, apparently. Because science – from the University of Nevada to the University of Roehampton – says walking backwards is actually good for you: better balance, stronger legs and even sharper memory.

Who knew regression could be progress? At Blak Labs, we often take the weird, the trivial and the utterly pointless and turn them into bite-sized marketing lessons for clients and the creatively curious.

You can read more of these gloriously unproductive insights here. Proof that even the most pointless steps can take you somewhere interesting.

Miles Bingham, creative director at Atomic London

Thinking about pointlessness sent me wandering down a philosophical rabbit hole. I began wondering whether anything can ever be truly pointless. Surely every act carries at least a faint sense of purpose. A Zen Master might say, purpose is a construction. A mental trick. The mind cannot stand pure openness so it invents reasons to feel at ease. But I am not a Zen Master. I am from the East Midlands, a region not exactly famed for its Buddhist sages. Or much else really.

All my extra curricular creative projects seem to have a point. I have spent five long years fart-arseing about with a book on mental health, and my Sober Trekker insta account definitely has a purpose.

For something to be genuinely pointless it must serve absolutely no function at all. No ambition. No noble aim. Which brings us neatly to the home of the humble brag, LinkedIn. My tiny act of pointless rebellion against the thought piece titans is to create ludicrous profile pictures.

At the moment I am a MEGAWIZARD. Previously a Chippendale. Then the front man of heavy metal band MAN CAVE, and then I was friends with a horse.

None of it helped a single human. No brands were built. Utterly pointless. Although I had fun, which I suppose was the point. And so we circle back to the nature of true pointlessness.

Rick Chant, co-founder and ECD at We Are Pi

Recently I set about the pointless endeavour of creating something due to the very pointed things in the middle of our arms. I made some elbow patches featuring the face of the frontman from the band with the same name. That's right, 'Guy Garvey's Elbow Patches.' Why? Because if a pun presents itself, I will absolutely ruin my life pursuing it.

And while the industrial-scale faff of creating CD-gatefold holders, each one rubber-stamped with inky little Garvey faces, complete with postcards lovingly whipped up by my mate Jonay, should’ve been the highlight, it wasn’t. The real joy was the licence to message people I’d never normally have any business bothering.

Rowetta from Happy Mondays said she loved them but they “wouldn’t go with her outfits.” The Lovely Eggs said they were “something they could live without.” And Shaun Keaveny simply said "No."

Now they sit in a box, all 300 of them. Quietly judging me from the corner.

Michelle Bower, associate strategy and transformation director at Dalziel & Pow

I trained in the commercial arts: illustration and copywriting. So my output is in service to clients and their audiences. It’s been drilled into me to intercept the target audience, land the key messages, and inspire an action or reaction. So when the itch to create starts to tingle or I can sense the need to reconnect with creativity to destress, I have to actively unlearn my training and practice. I wouldn’t call it “pointless” creativity exactly, more “aimless”.

Joyful creativity – for me – means photographing yellow things that catch my eye, then making an album of them each month. Joyful creativity is keeping a micro sketchbook on a keychain to capture something I find deliciously drawable. Joyful creativity is collaging beauty out of soon-to-be recycling, ‘drawing’ with scissors and scraps, and arranging the pieces.

By practising joyful curiosity, especially at this time of year, I believe we can all be radiators, not drains. So, fill up your creative cup your way and radiate joy. Future you’s resilience depends on it.

Pointless? Aimless? Maybe. Joyful? Y’ello!

Barney McCann, head of creative at Born Social

Usually, my answer to this question would be something more typically creative; a robot hoover that paints or a VR music video, but this time it’s a project that is maybe less obviously ‘creative’ – I have been coding, developing and maintaining a website.

​Filter-sound.net is a tool to help people focus or relax. It randomly selects from hundreds of live radio stations globally, field recordings and found audio to help you tune out the noise and lock in. It was initially popular with neurodiverse people and has recently been getting more listeners looking for music outside algorithmically suggested Spotify tracks.

I’d never got into creative coding, and it’s been a learning curve, but it’s dawned on me how truly creative making a website is. It’s accessible, and the connection with an audience is immediate.

Filter has got more popular than I could have imagined with over 1000 daily users (it’s no Flappy Birds but a lot for me!) – honestly, I have no idea how to monetise it or leverage it into something else but the positive messages and feedback I get for it mean I couldn’t imagine stopping – and isn’t that the definition of pointless creativity anyway?

Abhilasha Chhabra, head of social at Toaster INSEA

My favourite pointless thing to do is acts of artistic vandalism. Words are my work and my worship so they tend to carry a bit of pressure, but as a kid who was always terrible at art, there is nothing quite as freeing as vandalising my own furniture with doodles. A ridiculous expression of my own free will.

Suddenly when the pressure of being good is taken off and when your work has consequences only for you, then the silly starts to look pretty and your brain feels a little less weary.

Mike Slane, co-founder and director at Practice

Earlier this year I was taking a walk, and came across an unexpected treasure from the past in one of the many Little Free Libraries that dot my neighborhood. The book – ‘Modern Dance’ (1949) – is a sort of “how to” of dance poses, a catalogue of sequences that detail positions for floor exercises, jumps and everything in between. Apparently, this is what people used for tutorials before the internet.

I immediately saw the possibility to animate the photos, and back at the studio, I scanned, prepped and sequenced one of the pages. A dancer sprang to life, and I was hooked. In the margins between jobs and life, I set about scanning and sequencing hundreds of images and created a short “passion” music video for the french band L’Impératrice, using the wonderful track, ‘Le Départ’.

It wasn’t for a client, and to be honest it was an outlier in my portfolio. But, in a quiet period of commercial projects (and a bit of a directional rut) it totally woke me up creatively, reminding me of the joy and delight I get from animation. As much as we want to think these things – art, beauty, self expression – are pointless, that might just be the point.

You can watch 'Modern Dance' here.

Tim Krakowiak, lead 3D artist at BUCK

The night before writing this, I whipped out the iPad and drew an incredibly average picture of a dude with a crazy mullet. I'm pretty bad at drawing, so I've been trying to lean into that and draw things that are funny or observational, and a little rough around the edges. I think there's a real charm to that kind of art. It feels so refreshing to make something just for fun, with zero pressure to share with the world unless I choose to.

As crazy as it may seem, sometimes I feel like I've forgotten how to be creative. After 12 or so years as a 3D artist, it becomes hard not to think of 3D as just another job. It's important to step back every once in a while and find ways to remind ourselves why we got into the creative industry in the first place. Even though I don't always feel like doing personal work, once I bite the bullet, I almost always walk away with a little fire in my belly. I think it's really important to make stuff without the goal of sharing it. It's totally fine if you want to share something once you're done, but removing that pressure early on always makes the process more enjoyable. At least, it does for me.

I stave off creative burnout by running. A lot. I just completed an 80km Ultramarathon a few weeks ago and I'm about to race in a 100km event in two weeks time. Spending so much time outdoors training and away from the computer helps even things out. All those hours running gives me the time and space to come up with new ideas or think of fun things I'd like to make. And a lot of the time, I won't even think of work at all which is also great.

One more thing that helps me avoid creative burnout is variety. I think trying new things, or spending time with hobbies can help reignite the creative spark. One of the best things I did this year was purchase an iPad and start drawing (poorly), which in turn has led to me coming up with new ideas and projects I'm excited about.

Thomas Stimson, managing partner at DOOH.com

In such a creative industry where our creativity is constantly channelled into our work, a dose of 'pointless' creativity can feel overdue. As part of Culture Club at the WPP Media campus, we hosted a relaxed Draw & Sip session, a simple drop-in space with pencils, markers, watercolours, still-life objects, snacks, calming music and some great London skyline views.

It gave everyone a chance to step away from screens, switch off for a moment and make something just for the fun of it. No brief, no pressure. Just a quiet reset that left people feeling lighter. However, our doodles didn’t stay pointless for long: some became part of a small staff art exhibition that brought the whole thing full circle.

Elliot Gerard, CCO at Heartlent Group

As the creative leader of Heartlent Group, a husband and father of two, I rarely get time for the personal creativity that defined my early career. Personal work put me on the radar of ESPN, the New York Knicks, athletes like LeBron James, and others. The experiments I shared on my feed opened professional doors I didn’t even know existed, shaping the creative path I’m on today.

As my career evolved and responsibilities as a parent grew, that kind of self-initiated artwork faded into the background. Recently, though, I felt the pull to create something purely for the sake of love, not for a client or a deadline. I wanted to give my children a creative expression of how I see them, something that captured their personalities, passions and everything that makes them who they are.

Using a visual style I’d developed for past campaigns, I created portraits that intertwined with symbolic elements representing their interests and evolving stories, shaped with their input. It served no commercial purpose. There was no brief or launch date, just heart.

It was a “pointless” project that reconnected me with the joy of making and reminded my family, and myself, why creativity matters.