// description
Crazy 8s is a rapid sketching exercise where a participant folds a sheet of paper into eight panels and sketches eight distinct ideas in eight minutes, spending roughly one minute on each. The tight time constraint eliminates overthinking and forces the brain to move past the first, most obvious solutions. The method is typically used early in a design sprint to generate a wide range of concepts before convergence.
// history
The exercise was popularised by Jake Knapp as part of the Google Ventures Design Sprint process, described in his 2016 book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Five Days. While rapid sketching exercises existed in design education before this, Crazy 8s became widely adopted because of the Design Sprint's influence on tech startups and product teams worldwide.
// example
A digital product creator uses Crazy 8s to explore eight different lead magnet concepts for her KDP audience. In eight minutes she sketches: a niche research checklist, a KDP calculator template, a done-for-you keyword list, a cover design checklist, a pricing strategy guide, a 30-day publishing challenge tracker, a competitor analysis worksheet, and a "niche selection quiz" flowchart. Ideas 7 and 8 were ones she would never have proposed through normal brainstorming. She develops the competitor analysis worksheet, which becomes her highest-converting lead magnet because it solves a specific painful task rather than giving general advice.
// katharyne's take
Eight ideas in eight minutes — sounds easy, sounds like it'll produce rubbish. It produces neither. The time pressure is the whole point. When you only have 60 seconds per idea, you can't overthink it, and your brain starts pulling from more unusual places after ideas 4 and 5 (the obvious ones) are done. I use this for content planning: eight thumbnail concepts, eight email subject lines, eight cover design directions. One minute each. The last two are almost always the most interesting.
// creative uses
- Run Crazy 8s on your next Etsy product line direction: eight product concepts in eight minutes, no research, no filtering. The concepts you generate after minute four — when the obvious ideas are exhausted — are the ones that tend to have the least competition because they're the least obvious to your competitors too.
- Use Crazy 8s for Midjourney prompt variations: write eight fundamentally different prompts for the same subject in eight minutes, then run all eight and see which one surprises you most. The surprise is your style signal — that's where your creative instinct is operating ahead of your analysis.
- Apply to course module structure: eight possible ways to teach the same concept in eight minutes (video, worksheet, audio, case study, template, quiz, checklist, live demo). The variety forces you to think about learning modalities rather than defaulting to whatever format you're most comfortable producing.
// quick actions
- Set a timer for 8 minutes right now. Fold a sheet of paper into 8 panels. Write or sketch one idea per panel for your current creative challenge — one per minute. When the timer ends, circle the two that you would never have reached in a normal planning session. Those are your leads.
- Run a Crazy 8s session every Monday morning as a creative warm-up: pick one creative challenge from the coming week and spend 8 minutes generating 8 approaches to it. Don't evaluate any of them until Wednesday. The distance gives you perspective and you'll often find that idea number 6 or 7 is the one worth building.
- Use Crazy 8s for email subject lines before your next newsletter: eight subject line options in eight minutes, then run the three most interesting ones through a subject line tool (like CoSchedule's Headline Studio) and pick the highest scorer from the ones you actually like. You'll rarely use idea number 1 or 2.
// prompt ideas
Simulate a Crazy 8s session for me on this topic: [your creative challenge — e.g. lead magnet ideas for my KDP audience / Etsy product concepts for the [niche] market]. Give me exactly 8 distinct ideas — numbered 1 through 8 — with none of them repeating the same approach. Make ideas 6, 7, and 8 progressively more unexpected.
I ran a Crazy 8s session and here are my 8 ideas: [list them]. Help me evaluate which 2 or 3 are worth developing further. Score each one against these criteria: [e.g. low competition, high buyer demand, fast to produce]. Then write a one-paragraph development plan for the top-scoring idea.
I need 8 completely different approaches to marketing [my product / Etsy shop / course launch] — one for each of these formats: short-form video, email, Pinterest, long-form blog, community post, collaboration, paid ad, and organic search. Give me one distinct angle per format that I haven't seen competitors use in [my niche].