How to store UX/UI inspirations easily with Eagle
As designers, we need inspiration daily basis. When it comes to storing these inspirations and getting back to them when needed is a bit of a challenge itself. You might end up having too many local files, saved on your computer and you can not easily transfer them from one to another. As a UX designer, it is a huge part of my job to seek inspiration, do research on best practices, and save them for later usage. However, saving, organizing, and storing them is an unpleasant experience overall generally. Especially capturing the images is a very time-consuming activity and never enjoyable.
These days so many solutions are occurring for this kind of problem. One of them is Eagle, which I learned from a senior colleague. I would love to give some insides about Eagle for designers who are seeking a good organizer tool.
Let’s have a look at what cool things I do with Eagle, and you can, as well.
Capture ideas easily with a browser extension
Searching for inspiration online is a very fundamental activity for designers. Almost every day we need to do research for design references. One of my daily challenges was taking screenshots of the ideas individually and storing them in a local file in a structured way. Keeping these files structured is always very hard and after some point, I started to neglect them. Because this is kind of a time-consuming activity, my downloads file was a mess after all, and I needed to invest extra time to organize them afterward.
What I like about Eagle is that this tool makes everything easier, especially with browser extensions. After you find a good example and if you want this idea not to disappear, you can simply choose a capturing option from the extension. You can either capture the area of a webpage, just the visible part of the page, or even the full page. Especially capturing the full-page feature is very handy that helps you to capture all pages from the top to the bottom without using any tool to merge the parts of the page. And the coolest part of the process is that Eagle saves automatically to your Eagle library, and from there you can drag the image to any related folder.
Other capturing options
Capturing from the browser is just one option for saving reference images in Eagle. You can also take screenshots from desktop apps yourself and drag the images into Eagle to store there. Additionally, you can drag images from your local file that you have saved before to the Eagle library. This way you can store them in Eagle library too.
Categorize ideas
Categorizing the images makes everything easier on Eagle. You can simply categorize references by folders or by tags. If you choose to store things under folders, you should choose a descriptive name for your folder, and also you can select different colors or icons for each folder to recognize things much faster.
One of the coolest features here is “smart folders”. After defining a set of rules of your choice, Eagle will automate things. Whenever an image is saved, that suits to that particular set of rules of a folder, Eagle will drag the image and store it under this category automatically. This makes everything super easy and fast. The only thing you should do here is just to capture images and let Eagle handle the rest.
Find references easily by filtering options
Let’s say that you found a really good reference for your project, and then you captured it and saved it for later. Of course, after a while, you can simply forget where you saved it. Even though you label folders logically, after you have so many folders in your library, finding a proper reference can get harder and harder over time. To solve this problem, Eagle has broad filtering options. You can simply filter references even by their color palette. I generally filter things by tags, but you have plenty of options you can choose from. You can simply create a set of rules to filter them to find a very specific one.
Ratings
The references you find are not always the best ones. However, you might think that these are still worth keeping for some inspiration. Or you found a really great example for your project and you want that one particularly more prominent over the other ones in your folder. In this case, you can actually give them ratings to distinguish them from one another. This helps you filter easily and quickly.
Get inspired by the community
There is a community section where you can get inspired in Eagle. There are also free design resources, and materials ready to use. In addition, the community includes a comprehensive list of design websites to search for more design inspiration on the web. It shares tons of design tools, and websites for color, stock images, icons, mockups, and many more. If you want to inspire with your designs or let them know about a new cool website that inspires others, you can simply share with the community in Eagle. Personally, I haven’t used that section yet, but I feel that it has so much potential for getting inspired and inspiring people.
Transfer libraries between computers
Each inspiration you put into Eagle will be stored in a “library”. You can have multiple libraries and merge them anytime. The library could be saved as a local file on your PC or in a cloud to have it sync on multiple devices. One cool thing is that, even though you saved everything in a local file, you can also transfer this library to another computer and then reload it into your Eagle. That is very convenient if you don’t have cloud storage.
Conclusion
These are the features that might help you as much as it does to me. It is very helpful to capture reference images from any part of the website or app easily. It provides easy and fast organization tools, that will save your time and energy. After using a couple of months, I realized that I enjoy exploring new ideas and storing them for later more than ever. I focused more on finding the references rather than storing or organizing them.
Do you know any other cool feature of Eagle that I haven’t explored myself yet? If yes, please leave it in the comments below. And if you know other useful tools for storing inspiration and so on, as Eagle does, or even better, please recommend them as well.
Thank you for reading!
*Disclosure: This story contains affiliate links. If you choose to purchase Eagle after clicking a link, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
