If creativity is a delicate ecosystem, how do we keep things in balance? Emmi Salonen’s new book explores creative burnout

When you’re working in the creative industry, it’s quite easy to turn all of your focus on to your creative output and leave almost no time at all to feed your creative input. Always chasing the next big project deadline, missing that film or exhibition you really wanted to see, or skipping a walk where your brain might have had time to wander to go the fastest route. Inspiration and time spent doing things that fuel your practice feel harder and harder to grasp at when burnout is a constant barrier, and that’s on top of creatives tackling complex new realities like the use of AI, an invention that demands that we speed up rather than slow down.

Finnish graphic designer Emmi Salonen has been running her independent practice, Studio Emmi, since 2005, partnering with clients and creatives who want to make a positive contribution to society and planet. However, somewhere along the way the designer realised she had been caught up in a loop, for months she came home from work with an exhaustion that she couldn’t quite shift: “Nothing I did helped get my energy back. Then a day came where I had no ideas, no spark left in me. I was burnt out. It gave me such a fright, I thought, ‘If I’m no longer a creative, who am I?’” she shares. This led the designer to take a year long sabbatical to travel and seek out some answers.

On her travels Emmi sought out two things: conversations with makers – from craftspeople on the Marquesas Islands to creatives in Ethiopia – and plenty of time in nature, where she became increasingly aware that everything is “interconnected and interdependent”, she says. Eventually, when the designer found herself back in Finland, she began to form a new concept, one that framed creativity as a delicate ecosystem that – like nature – begged for balance. It was not something, she realised, that could exist in a vacuum.

This led to the start of Emmi’s ecosystems project, whereby she developed a visual model for sustaining and nurturing your creative wellbeing around a few key questions: “What inputs does a creative person need to keep their ecosystem in balance? What support, resources and opportunities will feed them?” In uncovering the delicate web of inspiration and activities that fed into her personal creative practice, Emmi created a series of workshops and talks that took her all over the world to share her learnings with fellow creative thinkers.

Now at the 20 year mark of Studio Emmi, the designer has put all of these learnings about creativity into her debut book published by BIS Publishers: The Creative Wellbeing Handbook, a publication that brings together contributions from over 100 creatives from 26 countries, “with interviews and quotes from founders, leaders, and strategists at Women of Type, Google, karlssonwilker inc. and Luminary, alongside independent creatives including Stefan Sagmeister, Daniel Eatock, Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, Zipeng Zhu, Jean Jullien, Elizabeth Olwen, Ji Lee and Catalina Estrada Uribe”.

The handbook is built around Emmi’s radical new circular model where input is equally as valuable to output – without one we can’t have the other. “It covers five areas that act as fuel for creativity: connection, wonder, pause, movement, joy,” the designer shares. “The experience of each of these – their source, their importance, their availability – is as unique as your creative practice.” Through stories, exercises and research backed-up by science, the colourful creative guide offers readers a set of tools to build a more sustainable creative life. It doesn’t add to the to-do list – “it offers a way to refuel with the resources you already have”.

The publication illuminates a lot of the conundrums all creatives face, even though they often feel like hurdles we have to face alone. It reframes rest as something that is often the missing piece in our processes, and sheds a light on the value of the small, regular habits that truly keep our creative minds ticking. Across its featured interviews there is “a designer who takes guilt free dance breaks and returns to a sketchbook stacked with ideas, an art director who draws on a 20-year archive of photos and ephemera to spark new work, and a creative lead who defines success as owning her time”, Emmi shares. Reframing the narrative around productivity, the book blends story, reflection, global voices to shake the common structure loose and look beyond it.

The Creative Wellbeing Handbook is now available for preorder now on The Creative Ecosystems site. To launch the publication, on 22 January 2026, the St Bride Foundation in London will be hosting a creative wellbeing evening with Emmi, featuring a deep dive into the book, with a panel discussion and a book signing. Event details and tickets can be found on the St Bride’s Foundation website.