Creativity. It’s one of my favorite words of all time, a word I utter with reverence. Efficiency, another of my favorite words. Combining the two—creative efficiency—describes what I consider the single most venerated concept in the whole of professional creative industries. Creative efficiency. It means freedom—freedom to be imaginative and experimental in your design as well as freedom from as many of the time-consuming, distracting, unproductive mechanical steps you need to take to achieve a design as possible. It’s a doctrine of sorts, one that I hold sacred, one that I preach from pulpits of wood, metal, plastic, pixels, and, like this one, pulp. As an ideal, creative efficiency is about making every task, every flick of the mouse or stroke of the keyboard, forward movement in the progression toward a finished design. Its ultimate goal is directing every movement and every thought toward the design, not toward the tools or processes we must employ to construct a design.