Over the last few years, I've had the opportunity to explore the wonderful world of design, and I was delighted to find that learning to think like a designer helped me to become a better astrologer.

During the early days of the pandemic, a couple of software developers I knew where bored, so we spent some of our weekends creating astrology apps. I had no experience designing software whatsoever, but I dove in head-first, creating icons in Canva and user flows on scraps of paper. A few months of coding later, an Android app existed that looked exactly like what I imagined in my head.

I started with the hubris of a novice, but seeing an app I had designed working on my phone made me feel like a god. I threw myself into learning everything I could about designing apps. I became fascinated with UX design, flew through Google's UX certification course in a couple of months, and got an internship at an augmented reality gaming company who was working on bringing Dungeons and Dragons to the Metaverse.

UX designers are web/app designers, who are less interested in creating a good aesthetic and more interested in the way websites and apps function. They specialize in making apps and websites that feel good to use and are accessible for everyone. There is a great deal of creativity in the UX field, but creating apps and websites for companies requires UX designers to be practical. There is a process UX designers are required to follow, benchmarks they have to meet, and usability guidelines they have to follow. (A UX designer wouldn't put green text on a red background, for example, because those two colors together are a hazard for colorblind people.) At the same time, UX designers can't just read the guidelines and put together the optimal color scheme by number. Their decisions require human discernment. They need to answer: Optimal for what? What goals are we trying to reach and why? What dream of the future are we manifesting?

As an astrologer, I recognized the UX designer's balance of dreaming and practical discernment as the balancing act of Pisces and Virgo.

I knew from my experience as a fiction writer that creative process always involves alternating between creative expression and analytical editing, but I was delighted to find in my studies of UX design that designers have codified their experience with the creative process into a 5-stage design thinking process.

Understanding the design thinking process did wonders for my ability to see Virgo and Pisces working together in action. Bringing together Virgo, Pisces, and design thinking has brought so much more creativity into my work.

Step 1: Empathize

Pisces: Empathy for the Self

The creative process begins with Pisces. It begins with dreaming. This is the stage of the creative process where the sticky notes and colorful pens come out. It's when writers draw maps and create story bibles, when visual artists doodle.

The fluid, generative, piscean time is the most fun for many creatives, so we don't often spend a lot of time reflecting why this dreaming time is important. Dreaming is the pleasure reward for doing what we do, so the pleasure of creation is enough, right?

There is, however, more to this stage than just play. During this stage we are building empathy.

If we have a great deal of freedom in choosing what we will create, we often begin by empathizing with ourselves, connecting with the deep feeling sides of our own psyches and playing with different ideas.

As a student, I wasn't creating for a client, so my design process began with an app called Sharpen that randomly generates ideas for design projects. It gives you prompts like: Design a typeface for the CIA and try a playful style. The projects are specific enough to trigger your assumptions and associations, but they are vague enough to leave lots of room for creativity.

An example of a Sharpen prompt that I played around with was creating a menu for a fancy restaurant. I live in Portland, Oregon, and I immediately thought of the "Colin the Chicken" sketch from Portlandia. I imagined a menu that included links to all of the ingredients, allowing you to trace their history and see pictures of the farms they came from and get to know the farmers that raised them.

Because I lived in Portland, I naturally projected my environment and experience onto the vague idea of a "fancy restaurant." A person from Texas might have envisioned an app for a very nice barbecue place. A person from Barcelona might have thought of tapas.

The differences between these different ideas for apps reveal the importance of subjectivity in the domain of Pisces. These differences about what "restaurant" means are the unconscious assumptions and projections that we place on otherwise blank or bland things. When artists say that they see what is already there in a block of stone or on a blank canvas, and their job is just to let it out, the vision they are describing is Pisces.

During this first stage of the process, it is important to dream wildly. I never forgot that I was creating an app that needed to be professional, but I allowed myself to imagine what it might be like to create a calendar app for a cult or a planner for a touring 80s band.

Pisces and Virgo: Dreaming with the Inner Critic

When we are dreaming, we want to be in an open non-judgmental space. That state of consciousness is Pisces' happy place, but Pisces and Virgo are two sides of the same coin. You can't have one without the other. When you are dreaming, Virgo's critical analysis doesn't just disappear.

If you have done creative writing, you may have heard of the inner critic. It is the part of you that can't stop evaluating and judging. During the dreaming phase of the creative process, it doesn't just make it difficult to keep an open mind. It often seems to give feedback as if it has no idea what's happening, like a friend who corrects your grammar when you show them a painting.

Virgo is that inner critic. Most creativity guides tell you to tell the inner critic to go to hell, but it has a valuable function while you're in the dreaming stage: record keeping.

As a design student, when I was looking for a problem to solve, I went through many prompts in Sharpen, and I had dozens of dreamy ideas, but I dreamed in an organized way. I kept careful records of the prompts I considered and took screenshots of each one.

The purpose of the record keeping in this stage of the process is twofold:

First, it ensures that there is a record of your process so that you and other people can see how and why you made the decisions you did. Pisces says the tendency to do things just because, and it's difficult when you're in a Pisces state to explain why you do the things you do. You're like a romantic poet following the winds of inspiration. You probably won't know why you're making the decisions you're making while you're in the dreaming stage, but you will tell stories about your process later, so that it will look like what you did makes sense to other people. At the dreaming stage of the process, Virgo's job is to follow along as a notetaker, taking pictures of all of your sticky notes and the notes you made on bits of paper, so the stories you tell people about your process have evidence.

The second thing the record keeping does is it gives Virgo something to do. You can't just shut Virgo off, but Virgo likes keeping track of details, and knowing that Virgo will have lots of details to sort through later on in the process is inspiring for Virgo. It helps Virgo have faith that it's not going to be left out of the process entirely.

Pisces: Empathizing with Others

It is a rare creation that is only concerned with the subjective experience of the creator. In my design course, I learned that many business owners make the mistake of choosing projects from the founder's objective experience alone, making the things they wish existed, assuming that everyone has the same problems and wants them to be solved in the same way.

During the empathize phase of the design process, it is important to connect with your subjective self, but it is also important to break out of your biases and assumptions. While Pisces seems to be driving the empathy train, since it is a sign that is concerned with feelings, breaking out of your subjective lens requires rigor. You have to go out and gather data, talk to people, listen to their experiences of the problem and incorporate them into your design. All of these tasks are part of the Virgo function.

Empathizing with other people is very much about Virgo and Pisces working in tandem. Virgo needs to listen. It needs to take careful notes. It needs to understand with the mind. Pisces connects with the people we're talking to. It empathizes. It understands with the heart.

Step 2: Define

After you have gathered a bunch of ideas, you will be left with an enormous amount of information to filter through. You need to decide on a project. You can't do them all, at least not right now. One has to be prioritized over the others.

During this stage of the process, it is essential to involve both Virgo and Pisces.

Virgo: Analytical Discernment

Virgo sifts through all of the ideas that you've generated, and it decides what ideas are practical to implement. When I was working on projects for my portfolio site, I knew the projects that I wanted to feature on the site needed to display my skills. They needed to be professional, and they needed to be understandable to future employers. I quickly decided that building an app for a cult probably wouldn't look especially professional. I also decided that creating a "Colin the Chicken" app that pokes fun at Portland might not be the best idea since I will be looking for jobs in Portland.

Pisces: Discernment with Heart

At this phase it would be very easy to pick a project strictly on practicality. However, when you are working on a creative project for a long time, it's important to have some kind of personal, emotional connection with what you're making, even if it's just empathizing with the people who are having the problem you're trying to solve.

Virgo cares about the bottom line, and it's easy to cut the heart out of a process when you're working exclusively in a Virgo space. Once you have eliminated the problem options, it's important to allow Pisces back into the process. There are almost always a few options in the end that are practical and could be implemented. The final decision should come from the heart. Pisces is a water sign. It's closely connected with your feelings.

In the end, I decided that I would create a website for people who are looking for rental homes. I have been doing a lot of house hunting myself, and I am frustrated with the available options, so I knew it would be easy to empathize with renters.

Step 3: Ideate

Once you've decided what you're going to create, it's time to figure out what exactly that thing might look like.

You might be tempted to go with your first thought. "First though, best thought," right? But that's not the best idea.

The human brain is lazy. It prefers to go with the obvious thing first. When you're being creative, you don't want to do the obvious thing. Everyone else is doing the obvious thing--because they also learned "first thought, best thought.

You want to create something sparkling and original, and that means trying on lots of ideas, forcing your brain to break out of its assumption ruts and dig deep for novel solutions.

The best way to get your brain out of a rut is to play. During this stage of the design process, designers once again break out their favorite pens and sticky notes and come up with as many solutions as possible. In the way of Pisces, they accept and love their creative ideas without judgement.

Only after sketching out at least 8 possible solutions do designers add Virgo back into the mental mix. They look at all their ideas with discernment, choosing a solution that is practical to implement--and, at least, a little fun.

Step 4: Prototype

Most people think that the prototype phase is the entirety of the creative process. By now, you know that there is a lot more to the process than that.

The prototype phase is the stage when you start to actually build something. If you are a writer, this is when you sit down and write a first draft. If you are a designer, this is when you break out your design apps and put together wireframes.

The mix of Virgo and Pisces during this stage is unique for each creator. Some creators lean heavily on Virgo, like the science fiction writer William Gibson, who reads over his entire book, making corrections every morning before he starts work. Other creators are more piscean, like Philip K. Dick, who flooded his brain with chemicals and creatively flailed at his stories for weeks at a time in a shed.

Some disciplines impose their own requirements. UX design is highly technical. If you don't keep Virgo close by every moment you're in a design app, you'll quickly get frustrated when your designs are too disorganized to behave properly in demos. If your art is more like throwing paint at the wall, you may enjoy telling Virgo to chill and take pictures, far away from where the action is going on.

All creative styles and disciplines, however, involve a mix of Pisces and Virgo. Even Jackson Pollack, one of the more piscean painters on the planet, needed to clean the paint off, eventually.

Step 5: Test

The last stage of the design process is the phase most creatives loathe the most. It is the phase when your creative brainchild is done, and it's time to present it to other people and see what they think.

In the UX design world, this is the time when you put your prototype on a phone (or, worse, PowerPoint slides), show people how it works, and get feedback.

If you're a musician, this is the time when you play your new song for the small group of friends and collaborators who understand your style and will tell you the truth.

This stage is called the test phase and not the performance phase because there's a good chance the process isn't over. If you want to create something that speaks to other people, Virgo's criticism should be embraced during this time as you listen, once again, to the people who need your work with piscean empathy and compassion, and the determination to return to the creative process as long as it takes to manifest your vision in the world.

Conclusion

The design thinking process outlined above is elegant and simple, but the creative process is fluid and messy. Even in the Google course we were taught that progress moves in spirals, circling round and round through different phases of the design process over and over again, refining and perfecting.

Design thinking can help us to understand where we are in the creative process, to discern the potentials and pitfalls of our current phase, but it is not an assembly line of creativity. It is a dance between the practical analyst and the wild creative. In the language of astrology, it is the dance of the archetypes Virgo and Pisces.