What's My Biggest Inspiration
Answering the most frequent question I get as a designer
What’s your biggest inspiration?” or “How do you get inspired?” are probably the most frequent questions I get almost daily.
There are two points of view how to answer this:
- What I do to get inspired in general to “feel great” when I work
- Where I look for resources, examples, and materials for visual inspiration
I want to focus on the first case in this article.
Most people feel inspired just by looking at a bunch of nice pictures on the internet or browsing other people’s work, which is something I do as well for sure. I do save these as a visual inspiration for later, but this activity alone does not drive my creative process. It's only the first part that helps me to find references and “dots” that I can connect in many different ways.
So, What's the second part then?
Feeling inspired is like a particular “mood” in my case, and I’m mostly getting this feeling when I listen to specific music. It works the best when it’s something from my curated playlists, such as:
Music (and music discovery) is essential for me, and I’d even say it’s part of my design process. While many people may use music just as background noise to get their routine job done, I use it as fuel. I’m always looking for new sounds or weird remixes, and I use it as a primary source of good vibes, to get into the right “mood” and spark thoughts that I wouldn’t reach otherwise.
Music is my biggest inspiration
To be more specific it’s any type of electronic music from minimal ambient sounds to heavy dubstep drops. Sometimes I even go for the crazies stuff and wonder if those producers have a firearms license to create such songs.
Anyways, I don’t want you to start listening to this weird stuff like me (unless you really like it!) but instead, think about what is getting YOU inspired. You could find a similar inspiration source like music is for me.
How about going out to nature, working offline for better focus (avoid distractions), traveling to different places, reading fantasy books in the evening as a hobby, or using your sketchbook a bit more instead of staring into your screen all day long?
Whatever it may be it could help you to avoid creativity/inspiration blocks, repeating yourself, blindly following design trends, or just do what everyone else is doing. The inspiration process is far more exciting than that…
