At some point, many designers start to feel the weight of the daily grind — endless Figma files, feedback loops, task tickets. It's productive, sure, but not always creative. Over time, ideas start to stack up — half-sketched concepts, UI experiments, visuals that never made it past the first frame. This essay is about stepping back from that cycle and giving those ideas space to grow. It's about designing something not because it's on the roadmap, but because it's been sitting in your mind, waiting to be brought to life.
ActiveCollab is a project management app I'm currently working on. The Design team used to be a team of six, but now it's just me. Back when the team was larger, small side projects like this were more common. But after some time away from that rhythm, I felt the urge to take one on by myself.
Current look of the Projects page in ActiveCollab:
…where a four-hour redesign session took me:
I started with the most obvious elements — typography, icons, illustrations, and spacing. Switching to a different font allowed me to reduce letter spacing, and using a new icon set made it possible to work with smaller icons. Before long, I was able to shrink the side navigation panel and give the main content area more horizontal room to breathe.
Next, I redesigned the buttons to be more consistent and have a reduced height. This, in turn, allowed me to shrink the page header and the toolbox row, giving the main content area more vertical space to breathe.
While there was plenty more that could be improved, I focused on small, simple visual changes. In just four hours, I managed to redesign the Projects page to provide more vertical and horizontal space for the main content area — delivering real value that could serve as a strong pitch to other stakeholders. That's why I decided to share the design with them. Although the feedback was extensive and included additional ideas for improvement, I'll share just this one quote:
"I think it is a step in a good direction."
P.S. I've worked on a similar 4-hour project afterwards, this time the app needed a full right-to-left interface. It pushed me to rethink spacing, alignment and even the rhythm of the layout, since patterns that feel natural in LTR suddenly behave in unexpected ways. It probably deserves its own write-up, so I'll save the details for another article.
