Inspiration to-do
Those images that you collect for inspiration, do you ever go back to them?
I have been collecting images from the web for a very long time. When I see something that I find interesting, I make a copy and put it away somewhere. It started as folders on my hard drive, but now there are plenty of web services that help me do the same thing — which also means, there are plenty of people just like me who do the same.
I have two kinds of collections related to my design work:
- Short term– mostly mood boards for projects that I’m working on at any given time. For these, I usually want to collaborate with other and I might get rid of these once the project is over. To build these collections, I go looking for material.
- Long term– these keep on growing over time, and are mostly bookmarks for inspiration. These are more related to my interests and skills I want to learn. For instance, references to lettering, typography, color palettes, layout, industrial design etc. I might go back to these for various reasons:
- looking for mental stimulus when I am stuck on a design I’m working on
- approach a design from a perspective that’s different to what I already have in mind
- when I need material to play
- when I need references to help create something I’m working on
The long term collections are built of stuff that I find while not necessarily looking for anything in specific. These collections are meant to act as a list of inspiring images filtered for high quality. I turn to these when I am trying to get things done — so I don’t have to go hopping around websites (which usually ends up being very distracting).
Over time, the number of my collections has grown and so have the number of images in each collection. Ironically, I feel my collections might need another layer of filtering.
I know there are a lot of them out there, but I haven’t found a tool that I like to create and manage my inspiration bookmarks. Ember by Realmac Software showed promise, but it’s been a bit of a let down. It just doesn’t work. The app looks great, they have fantastic customer support but the product fails at it’s basic promise. I like Gimmebar, it isn’t the fastest or the most reliable though. Most other tools are either too noisy with too many features, or don’t have some basic features that I need.
Till I find something that works, I’ll probably keep hopping between the various options that I have.
How do you use your inspiration collections?
