People often asked me how can I quickly come up with new ideas or a visual direction in my daily work. Some asked me how do I made those aesthetic choices in my projects (And trust me I made a lot of bad choices, and occassionally a few good ones). I have no answers to these questions. Neither do I have a theory or a formula. If you insist, my answer would be I’ve seen a lot (and sure not seen enough).
As a designer myself, I do believe it takes genuine genius to come up with new and innovative design. But I am no genius, and I can only attribute my sense of making design choices to my years’ practice of consuming various designs. Looking through large amount of visual content helps me develop the ability to appreciate good design and sort of form a resorvior of inspiration in my head.
Here I want to share some sources of inspiration that I find super helpful for my daily work and I hope it’s useful to you as well. (I will leave the usual designer communities like Behance, Pinterest, or Dribbble out as they are the obvious ones. )
Agency websites
Design agencies are some of the most creative organizations in the world. Their websites are their front faces to attract clients so they usually go extra length to demonstrate their creative muscles in their portfolios. As they serve a wide range of customers so it would be unexpectedly inspiring to learn something that I might not be able to reach. One easy way to locate some of the best design agencies is on awwwards.com The site itself dedicates to regonizing the best web expeirences, making it a great source of inspiration, but the large amount (3893 to be exact) of agencies behind them are more interesting.
App Store
I bought another phone just for the purpose of trying out new apps. The App Store has become a major inspiration, not only because Apple did a great job promoting great apps, but also the fact that many of the apps are tested in the real world. They are functional and solving all kinds of problems, problems that I don’t know existed. On my other phone, I would just regularly go into any category to check what’s trending or eye-catching, then I would just download it and try out. If I spotted something interesting, I will just screenshot and document them.
Book stores
Even though I read a lot of e-books now, but I just love going to a book store to feel inspired. The dazzling array of book covers is simply too much for the eye to take it all in. The graphical books cannot be appreciated on the eletronic surfaces, but buying them home would be too much an investment. That’s why I would love to visit a book store and capture some snippets of visual content: photography, layout and composition, fonts, colors, etc.
Malls or retail environment
This is a way to not limit myself to just digital design. I do find the real world environment provides a lot of interesting inspiration and triggers. The malls or stores offers a variety of visual candies. The things you see in these environments may not lead to immediate ideas or results for your daily projects, but the observation itself could help you become more aware of what’s happening aorund you. And later the impression may inform your work in a unexpected way.
Above are just some starting point. They could be part of your daily routine of immsersing yourself in inspiring visuals or content. All I am trying to say is in order to generate interesting ideas, you have to be interested in the world. Go around the world and observe, and you start to notice those little details that make a design work. When your source of inspiration become borader, you will see how things can be connected and new ideas formed. So what’s your sources of inspiration?
