As a designer, it gets hard to become inspired. It’s one of those constant struggles where you look and search and seek to find inspiration in every place around you. This post is about how to find inspiration and what I do, personally, to become inspired. Hopefully this may, ahem, inspire you to find some inspiration as well.
I work on the computer constantly. This is my playground, my workstation and pretty much my life. Hours and hours of staring at the screen, looking over pixels and gazing at typefaces can become mundane and stale. Like most designers, musicians and artists, creative blocks happen all the time. Sometimes more often than we wish. But I have been doing an experiment for the past few months and I think, personally speaking, that I have found where my inspiration lies. I have found, specifically related to finding inspiration, that I need to get off the computer. I need to get out of my office. I need to get away from the coffee shop. I need to step out of my comfort zones and experience life and nature and be surrounded by things that have truly helped to inspire me.
I have made it a point to get outdoors. Go kayaking, fishing, hiking, put my feet in water and climb mountains. The inspiration in nature and our world is truly beautiful and organic. The past few months I have found that my level of inspiration with design has grown immensely since making an effort to get off the computer, turn off my iPhone and go experience the things that most of us find inspiring as we view it on our monitors or phones.
These experiences have influenced my recent work and helped to bring back memories and references of things I see in the natural world around me. My personal design style has a very natural feel to a lot of my work and being submersed in these settings and atmospheres have really caused the creative juices to flow and the distance between my creative blocks have diminished greatly. I encourage you, whether you are a designer, artist, musician or just looking for new things to experience in life, to get off the computer. Nothing is as breathtaking on a screen as seeing it in real life. There is something powerful about being in a kayak and watching bald eagles fly overhead while being followed by seals in the water. It’s amazing. Inspiration is out there; sometimes you have to go find it.