How To Fight Designer’s Block

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How To Fight Designer’s Block

by JonGos

Although I love design and web development, there are some days when I hit something akin to the writer’s wall. There really are days when I would rather bang my head against the wall than try to conjure up something new an exciting for a new client. I wrote about some places that I find inspirational a few weeks back at Smashing but that’s just me getting wanderlust. So where can you get inspiration when you’re fresh out of ideas and kind of sick of being creative?

Flickr.com or StumbleUpon’s Flickr channel are two good places. Just stumbling through and seeing some of the amazing people your age, younger and older are doing always makes me feel like a bit of a slacker. There’s no particular place or group I go to on these sites, I just let the fates guide my searches to see what looks interesting.

Magazines. While design magazines are great, what really inspires me is looking at magazines that aren’t necessarily design oriented. Things like National Geographic, Wired, Adbusters, Maxim, UTNE…event mostly text mags like The Economist or The New Yorker. Anything to put my head into a space that I don’t normally go.

Album covers and Movie Posters are great places for inspiration. When I first started using Processing I had some big ideas about creating the type of user interface that Tom Cruise used in The Minority Report. Even bad movies can give you good ideas, at least that’s my excuse for owning Stephen Dorff’s FearDotCom.

Museums. Whether it’s contemporary art or the masters, Museums are a great place to witness at another artist’s work and influence and either get really depressed or really inspired. Either way, you’ll come out with a different perspective than when you went in.

There are lots of places, parks, theaters, your backyard. Anyplace can serve as inspiration it’s really more about varying your daily routines enough that your start to notice all the beautiful inspiration around you.

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