Meet Steve
About Steve Supple
Author, graphic designer, and creativity coach — helping people rediscover the creative thinker they were born to be.
The story behind the work
Steve Supple spent more than fifteen years working as a graphic designer — which meant being creative on a deadline, for clients who had opinions, whether the muse showed up or not. That daily confrontation with creative pressure forced him to study creativity not as a romantic concept, but as a practical skill.
What he found transformed his career. Creativity isn't a talent you're either born with or not. It's a set of learnable practices, mental models, and habits that anyone can develop. The "creative people" we admire aren't special — they've simply internalised skills that most of us were never explicitly taught.
That realisation led Steve out of client services and into coaching, first with individual creatives, then with teams and organisations. He discovered that the patterns blocking a solo designer are the same patterns blocking a C-suite executive or a whole creative department. Different surface, same underlying mechanics.
I Need To Create is the distillation of that work — a practical framework for understanding the fundamental nature of personal creativity, diagnosing your specific blocks, and building the practices that unlock your creative potential on demand.
My journey
Four chapters that shaped the work
Design school and the blank canvas problem
Studying graphic design in the late 1990s, Steve learned craft — typography, colour theory, layout — but nothing about the actual process of generating ideas. His first years in the industry were a constant struggle between professional expectations and an unpredictable inner creative engine.
Breaking it open
A decade in, Steve became obsessed with the question underneath the question: not "how do I make better work" but "how does creativity actually function?" He began reading cognitive science, studying improvisation, interviewing other creatives. The picture that emerged was both simpler and stranger than he'd expected.
From practitioner to coach
Steve began sharing what he'd learned — first informally with colleagues, then as a structured coaching practice. He found that the frameworks that had transformed his own creative output worked equally well for others, regardless of their field or background. Creativity, it turned out, is more universal than anyone had told him.
The books
I Need To Create is the first book in a series — a practical distillation of everything Steve learned and taught over fifteen years of creative work and coaching. Two more books are in progress, each building on the last: from understanding your creativity, to building with it, to growing beyond it.
Every person has creative potential. Most just haven't been shown how to access it.
My mission is to change that — through books, coaching, and speaking that give people practical tools, not vague inspiration. The creative thinker you were born to be isn't gone. They just need the right conditions.
Work with Steve
Speaking
Steve speaks at conferences, leadership retreats, and corporate events on creativity, innovation, and building creative cultures. Keynotes and workshops available.
Enquire about speaking →Coaching
One-to-one coaching for creatives, leaders, and anyone who wants to develop a more reliable and sustainable creative practice. Limited spots available.
Enquire about coaching →