Not so much a direct answer to the question, but perhaps food for thought…
For what it’s worth, creativity comes in various forms. For instance, my primary client is a manufacturer for whom I design technical content. I work in (one of) their Engineering department(s) where products are developed, and I’m responsible for all the printed items that accompany the products when they leave the factory on their way to the customer. There’s some labeling, but it’s safe to think of it as mostly “documents;” the kind that you might often pull out of a box and throw away. In this work, I rarely make choices related to font and color, there is an Engineering Communications Style Guide to which my work adheres, and the writing and illustrating I do is straightforward and anything but dramatic. Most people who think of themselves as “creative” would DREAD doing this work, and consider it anything but creative. However, I was able to carve out a very secure niche with this client by approaching the job creatively. The way I manage the content development process, new methods I devised to convert and use the Mechanical Engineers’ 3D models to produce high-fidelity vector graphics, and my upgrades to their writing and layout standards seemed “revolutionary” to them compared to the way they published these documents before my time. Now, materials that were once a cost-of-doing-business chore are rightly respected as integral to the perceived quality of their products.
