3 Great Resources for Design Inspiration
Hey everyone, this is my first post on Medium, but not my first blog post. If you’d like to view my older posts, you can do so at my archived blog page which can be found here.
Today I figured I’d talk about some of the tools I’ve come across that can help designers find inspiration. The resources I’ve listed here can still be immensely handy if you’re taking on any sort of creative project though, so if you’re not a designer, don’t feel discouraged at all.
One of the first steps in the design process for many people is finding inspiration. Looking at what contemporaries have done can oftentimes take your design in a direction you hadn’t even thought of just yet. What’s more, for the beginners out there, correct use of inspiration can often teach you the ways in which certain aesthetic styles help other designers achieve a certain look or feel for a project. Using inspiration is definitely something that’s helped me learn along the way and it’ll surely continue to help me as I keep developing my own skills.
So, here are my three great resources for inspiration:
Pinterest is the first on this list and rightfully so. While many people might think of Pinterest as the place people go to collect things like recipes or DIY project ideas, it works super well for designers too.
In the design world, many projects are started through the creation of a mood board. Mood boards are collections of pieces that encapsulate the feeling a designer is going for. Creating a mood board is a useful process in any research phase and it can often help designers come up with new and relevant ideas rather quickly. Traditional mood boards, however, can take some work to set up and often require a lot of time that many designers just don’t have.
Enter Pinterest.
While Pinterest is definitely something tons of people use recreationally, it’s also a great resource for quickly mood boarding. This especially becomes the case when your feed is filled with nothing but creative designs. Scrolling through and seeing really thoughtful and incredibly visual pieces is often all it takes to become unbelievably inspired. Aside from your feed though, what also makes Pinterest so useful is that you can add your own custom posts. If I’m out and about and I see a really cool poster, you better believe I’m going to take a picture of it and add it to my collection.
I often find that Pinterest works best by creating a few different kinds of boards. Including boards that focus on a specific mood/aesthetic or boards that are created on a project-by-project basis. Doing these kinds of things will make it incredibly easy to pick up on certain patterns and will ultimately help you shift your designs in informed directions.
And of course, if you’re like me, you can create a big “creative wall” full of pieces that catch your eye. For me, this helps me nail down my own design preferences so that I can understand why I like what I like and so I can pick my tastes apart.
Brand New
Let’s face it: logo design is a tricky thing. I once read that logo design is a kind of “poetry for designers” (I can’t actually remember where I read this now, but I know I’ve seen the comparison before). And while this might sound over-the-top or even pretentious, poetry and logo design do in fact share some commonalities. Primarily, both try to give someone the impression of something. Poetry tries to give readers an impression of a situation/emotional state/idea through metaphor and creative use of language while logos try to give viewers an impression of who or what a company is through symbolic representation. I digress.
Getting things just right in logo design can occasionally be a time-consuming process and what’s more, sometimes it can feel like you don’t even know where to begin at all. A site that’s really helped me is Under Consideration’s Brand New.
Brand New says that “Its sole purpose is to chronicle and provide opinions on corporate and brand identity work.” And that’s what it’s most useful for. As a designer, it’s important to look at what other people are doing and to learn from their successes as well as their failures. Reading thorough reviews can help you understand why certain things work and certain things don’t, but it’ll also help you learn to create your own opinions on “proper brand design” and that’s something that’s infinitely more valuable.
To give you a better taste of what it is that they do, here are three great articles by Brand New:
Kuler (or Adobe Color)
Last but certainly not least is Adobe Kuler/Color (I’m still going to call it Kuler, sorry). This is a tool that many people already know about but its usefulness demands that it gets its own suggestion!
Sometimes when you’re in the initial phases of designing something, colors are one of the first things you’ll think about. Sometimes, entire projects can start from an exploration of a color palette. Sometimes, you’re working within the confines of a predefined brand and you already have your colors laid out in front of you.
But other times…Choosing a color can be an incredibly difficult process. Not to mention choosing supporting colors on top of that? It can easily become frustrating.
When color palette issues arise, Kuler can give you a great nudge in the right direction. Maybe you just want colors that go well with the one you already know you want to use. Kuler’s “Create” section can quickly show you 4 supplementary colors that work with your pick according to color theory (i.e. analogous colors, complementary colors etc.).
Or if you really don’t know where to start at all, you can even use Kuler’s “Explore” option. Using their search bar, you can type in any sort of “visual word” (rustic, sleek, modern) and a ton of different color schemes will come up. Then you can mix and match different results to make your own original color palette that’s based on a certain feeling or mood.
To top everything off though, once you see or make a color scheme you like, you can save it to one of your CC libraries (if you use Adobe CC) and use it immediately! Technology sure is something amazing…
Final Thoughts
These are just a few great resources available to designers. They’re all simple to use and very efficient, so they’re definitely worth a look, in my opinion. I think I’ll write one more article covering this topic so look out for that next week!
Until next time.
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