Creative confidence is the trust in one’s ability to generate creative ideas and act on them. It is a widely studied construct in creativity research, a predictor of creative performance, and a central goal of leading design education programs (e.g., Stanford d.school, IDEO U). GenAI-powered tools have changed how people create as genAI can produce creative products, with minimal input or creative thinking. While this can expand one’s capacity to create, it risks cognitive offloading, a sense of authorship, and ultimately lowers creative confidence. Research suggests that how people use genAI shapes these effects, with creative confidence supported when people explore and collaborate before using genAI, and when genAI tools are transparent, learning-oriented, and process-focused (Al-sa’di & Miller, 2026; Habib & Gardiner, 2026; Krajcer et al., 2026).
Creative confidence is malleable, shaped by experiences, and mediated by technological, social, and task-related conditions, including genAI use. The construct builds on Bandura’s (1977) self-efficacy, a person’s belief in their capability to succeed at a specific task, which develops through mastery experiences. Creative confidence is theorized to have two components: trait-like beliefs in one’s creative potential, built through past experiences, and context-specific belief in one’s ability to solve a particular problem (Karwowski et al., 2019).
This poster uses a non-linear format and reflects the system in which creative confidence develops. Four entry points explore the construct itself, creativity and design work, genAI-powered tools, and the system in which a creator acts, allowing viewers to choose their own path of engagement. Connections between the entry points highlight relationships and points of comparison.
Viewers will gain an understanding for deciding when and how to introduce genAI so that it supports rather than undermines creative confidence. The work is relevant to researchers preparing presentations, posters, and articles, and to instructors designing courses, assignments, and learning environments.
How It’s Made
Briefly, my process in creating this poster included the following steps:
- Research into Creative Confidence, creativity, and the influences of genAI-powered tools
- Rough sketching, mapping, and brainstorming (sketches by hand)
- Metaphor development
- Designing graphical elements (I used an iterative combination of tools including the open-source vector design program, Inkscape, raster image editor, Adobe Photoshop, and ChatGPT txt-img)
- Pulling it all together (Inkscape)
and importantly, these process steps are iterative: I constantly moved through redesign as new connections and ideas were made at times leading me to return to further research, more sketches, metaphors, new graphical elements, etc …
I largely took the style guide from this website (to save time). There are two main font types:
- a serif heading/body font that instill more of a formality (while the heading is half scribbled-in for an ‘in-progress’ or ‘roughness’)
- a handwritten heading/body font to depict commentary, push-back, or edits
I used genAI-powered tools throughout the process. Large language models, some of which grounded in chosen scholarly sources, was used to locate and extract relevant information, double-check the accuracy of claims, and support with sentence clarity, grammatical accuracy, and clarity of communication. Image-generation was used to develop various graphical assets.
Rough Planning Sketches:
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