What It Means to Live Creative
Today is “Live Creative Day,” and while I generally don’t like what I call “Social Media Holidays,” this one is one I can relate to.
I am the Lead Designer at IdeaBooth, a small creative agency in Chicago’s West Loop that specializes in branding. This means that we do a lot — A LOT — of design work, and as lead designer it can feel like drinking from a fire hose at times.
As designers, it’s our job to be the member of the team absorbing inspiration like a sponge, and utilizing it to create unique looks and feels for our clients that also fit the design trends of today. It can be a hard balance to strike, but with some practice it becomes second nature.
Living creative, to me, means absorbing inspiration, processing it, and creating beautiful designs for my clients.
Seeking Out Inspiration
To start, and before it becomes second nature, as a designer you need to seek inspiration out. Where that will come from depends on your specialty: maybe it’s driving around to see some new billboards, or diving into Instagram, or just reading a book.
It really depends on YOUR area of concentration. I am lucky enough to get to work on a little bit of everything given the nature of IdeaBooth’s client base, here are some places I look for inspiration that serve as great “wide nets”.
Instagram has always been great for design inspiration in general, but is particularly good for typography. Go out and find typographers you like, and follow their page.
I once saw a graphic shared on a design-centric page that utilized a really unique, modern-looking sans-serif font. This inspired me to a solution on a client’s brand-build, utilizing a similar font when the old one just wasn’t working.
Dribble and Behance are both great platforms for seeking out current design trends, and are used by designers to show off the cool work they are doing. Both are great for seeing where the design zeitgeist is, and even for adding to it.
Outlined text is very popular right now. I saw it used a lot in Dribbble shots and on Instagram posts and decided to incorporate it into the Six Labs branded gifs for Instagram stories. This is now a style that we use often for this client’s Instagram stories or other social graphics.
Pinterest is ideal for seeking inspiration out of your comfort zone, as it’s known as a hub for all things creatively aesthetic.
We recently have been working with many cannabis brands. For one of our client’s packaging, we researched not only cannabis packaging, but food packaging and cosmetic packaging on Pinterest and created boards for the design styles, packaging materials, and general looks that we liked and felt could fit the brand.
Awwwards.com is great for finding website design inspiration. Finding good website inspiration can be like finding a needle in a digital haystack, and Awwwards.com is the best place to start.
When building our cannabis brand, we utilized this site for discovering some retail layouts for the product page, and have utilized that method with several other clients, as well.
Inspiration Seeking ME Out
When this inspiration seeking becomes second nature, it will start to feel as if inspiration is seeking YOU out.
Make sure to take mental note of the inspiration jumping out at you, because you’ll need it later!
I see this sort of inspiration everywhere.
Billboards are a great source of inspiration. With billboards, you have limited space, and just as limited time to get your information across while also catching eyes. Easier said than done!
In recent years, Chicago has been taken over by the Brian Urlacher “Restore” billboards. These were everywhere, and served as a great inspiration for Turano’s “Grilling Season Restored” campaign. We mimicked the layout of the polaroid before image with the larger after image as the main focus. We created a cheeky design by putting the plain buns in the before polaroid and the poppy seed hot dog buns and sesame hamburger buns as the main focus beauty shots. It all came together when we advertised these billboards in a location with several of the original Brian Urlacher “Restore” ads.
Restaurant Menus are also a great source of inspiration. Similar to billboards, restaurants have a lot of information to share, in a very limited space. Now that we can go back to restaurants, I have started paying close attention to menus and how the designs are handled when there is a lot of content involved.
Conveying this information succinctly, while maintaining the attention and curiosity of customers is crucial for restaurants. What types of layouts are they using? How many columns are they using? How many distinct font styles are needed to create enough hierarchy in the text?
I used all of these as inspiration for Connie’s menu redesign, in which we were tasked with researching menu trends and reformatting the layout in order to incorporate more content into the same amount of space.
Inspiration also flows in from my personal life, retail sites I frequent and their social media channels in particular. Retail brands have to catch the eye of current and potential customers alike, it’s crucial to growing the brand. They do this through unique designs, fonts, and other brand assets that can often serve as inspiration.
Finally, the most cliché inspiration, music. Music has always spoken to me, and when a particular lyric stands out to me, I like to create typographic posters for fun and share them on dribbble. I like to do these smaller projects when I’m in a creative slump so I can keep working on typographic layout and design composition, while also getting the creative juices flowing again.
In Person Inspiration
Work from home has been a dramatic change of pace for most, and as I’m sure most everyone can relate, it has had its ups and downs.
My biggest “up” was (and always is) my husband Chris, who is also a designer.
Working from home has allowed us to bounce ideas off of each other and get feedback we would normally get in an office setting. We often step into each other’s offices during the day to get feedback or review a design, suggest solutions to problems, and even give each other tips on process.
We are often teaching each other new skills (he’s more skilled in Lightroom & Photoshop, where I’m more skilled in Illustrator & Sketch), so we help each other out when we need to figure out how to do something out of our comfort zones.
While this isn’t directly an option for everyone, feedback is. Ask for it, or you’ll never get it!
Living Creative for ME, is what has helped me develop my skills as a designer. Actively searching for inspiration was a huge start, and led to a natural knack for it seemingly coming to me.
I hope that all of the marketers, artists, and fellow designers out there reading this enjoy it, continue to Live Creative, and draw inspiration from this crazy world we’re living in!
If you have any questions, or want to just reach out and say hello, you can reach me or the IdeaBooth team at hello@idea-booth.com.
