We all know that designers are visual blog/twitter junkies, and that we scroll as fast and insatiably as we can in order to absorb tons and tons of visual content.

This way, our minds can keep up with the latest trends, interactions, typefaces, transitions, all the things!

Unfortunately, the speed and volume of visual reference available to us nowadays doesn’t let us take on the nice compositions, colors, shapes and flows.

Here is something I do to pause, really observe beautiful work, then “store” it in my mind. Hopefully my brain will later regurgitate what I saw on top of a comp, along with my own creative juices (ew!!) and, I can make it my own.

So, let’s say I run into this beautiful typeface that my coworker Mike posted the other day on our internal #typography slack channel.

I’m loving the strong angles on the terminals, and how the comma is providing this tension that silences are suposed to have in conversations or music.

I’m going to draw the “e” and the “1958” with the comma as I really want to remember them…

Yikes! — those are some really shitty drawings, but actually during the process, I really observed the typeface and “sensed” it.

Now it is in my mind and it won’t go away. Aaaah…

How about something more fun. This time, a beautiful Willi Kunz cover:

and now, my 30-second sketch:

I will then be influenced by this reference during my design process tomorrow, or next week? Or next year? And probably in a way I won’t fully be aware of: maybe a nice letter composition for an on-boarding screen, or, use the dotted line style for a new stats UI…. or maybe paint my room with pink bands? who knows?!! — that is the beauty of it…