It feels quite meta to meditate on the format of this newsletter in this newsletter, but here we are.
As much as I love Substack for the way it champions great writing and how simple and clean it is, the downside is that it's not very flexible. The formatting options it lets you use in a newsletter are pretty limited, and it doesn't give you many ways to color outside the lines.
I ran into this problem when creating the template for these newsletters because I wanted to make sure there was some blank space between posts so it was clear where one idea stopped and another idea started when scrolling through quickly. But this functionality didn't exist. You couldn't just put a few hanging line breaks at the end of a section to leave some space before the next. The platform just didn't allow that. Which was freaking frustrating because it seemed like such a simple ask.
So I went into brainstorming mode. How could I solve this problem? If the platform isn't going to let me just create blank space with line breaks, what else can I add to give the same sense of visual space between posts?
And that's when I thought, "What if I created a little picture that represented each post and put it at the top of that section?" I started experimenting with what this type of header might look like, and after a few different design attempts, I came up with the header style you see today with the little circled story number and a drawing reflecting what each post was about. And I freaking loved it. I thought it was a really clever way to not only visually separate each new section but also set the mood for each post and give the reader something to toy with as they read.
But I wouldn't have ever thought of this idea if Substack had just been designed to let me do what I wanted it to do. If it just let me put a few line breaks to separate stories, the cute little pictures would never exist, and this newsletter would look even more boring than it already does.
It points to an interesting idea. That sometimes we need constraints on us to really be pushed into being our most creative. It makes me think back to Jack White's obsession with the number three when he was in The White Stripes. Jack had this unwritten rule in the band that whatever song they created, it had to be centered around only three main instruments: vocals, guitar, and drums. Any promotional or album cover photos they did had to use only three main colors: white, black, and red. And while this sounds like a handcuff, Jack talks about it much more frequently as inspirational because it gave him focus. The box he was working within was so small that it pushed him to explore each and every crevice, and that's what gave us "Seven Nation Army."
I think we like to romanticize the idea of creation without limits, but we can't really action upon it. The sample set of thinkable ideas is just too large. I think more often than not we do our best work when we do have some constraints on us because it pushes our brains into looking at things from a different angle. It makes us look past the obvious solution and really examine how each tool at-hand can be used in a new way. It's frustrating as hell when all you want to do is add a few extra blank lines to a newsletter, but it gets to a better product in the end.
Comments