How to Look Within for Design Inspiration

Tue, Dec 2, 2008

Easy Design Tips, Society

How to Look Within for Design Inspiration

Aside from looking at other people’s work for inspiration, there are other ways to bring out that creativity within yourself. When the creative juice is running low, the natural instinct would be to reach for those expensive design books you bought just for this occasion. In them, you will see from the eyes of the designers, a transcript of their experience.

While it is good to absorb as much creative output as you can, there comes a time when you must venture within yourself for the answer. Forget the technology, forget your habitual styles, forget the conditioning.

Sometimes you may feel stressful at trying to find the design solution. Please picture this: The designs we try to create are merely solutions to problems that we created in the first place. Without us first creating the problems, there would have been no need to find a solution now. So look back to before the problem occured and see what was working naturally already. There’s the solution.

Try to feel what would be most natural in the design, try to feel your own hints of discomfort. We have become so desensitized to media and sensory bombardment that we don’t even realize the stress on ourselves. Look around and see what makes you happy, and study it. Why does it give you pleasure or peace of mind? Then try to replicate that harmony, strength and comfort into your designs.

Look around you again, caress the textures with your eyes, feel the flow of the air circulating around the room. Go back to the basics, don’t add complication to an uncomplicated matter. Nurturing the pureness of your creativity will unlock many new insights and approaches to design.

Computers are a tool through which our creativity can express all the colors of our imagination. Avoid the pitfall of letting the computer tell us what we can make, but instead, look inside to see what you want to create. It is a fast-paced world we live in, don’t forget to slow down sometimes to enjoy it.

How do you get your design inspirations?

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2 Comments For This Post

  1. I really enjoyed this. It let me sit back and reflect on what I really need to reflect on and how the world around us can influence our creativity no matter what. I appreciate the fact that you can step back and harness the creativity inside you.

    Fantastic! Floating it!

    Andrew Markle-Desjardins´s last blog post: How Knowing People That Know Other People Works

  2. CreativeHerb says:

    Thank you for your encouraging words, and I’m glad you enjoyed it. Sometimes it’s just too easy to get caught up in life with all the technology and distractions. Maybe I should write a bunch of Post-its with the words “whoa, slow down for a second” and put it around the house.

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