Getting design inspiration when you’re stuck in an office.

Get out of the office for some “research”.

As designers we take inspiration from everywhere and anywhere. Working in an office all day I find that the design life can get sucked right out of me and coming up with creative and fresh ideas is hard with the buzz of a workplace + phones + radio (playing crappy music).

So what do you do? Step one is to envy any full time freelancers who get to design where the want.
This is by far the most flexible way to get the creative juices flowing. Try and take a note out of their book, and if your able to, take your sketch book and wander out of the office. This is a great start that will just let your mind wander in a different direction that it would at your desk.

Look at the project you are working on and see if its possible to take yourself to somewhere that represents the clients industry and also represents where you want the project to go. In many designs, its the little attention to detail things that set it off and make the design stand out from the crowd. And if you get to know the industry you are designing for, those little details will be relevant to both client and their customer.

Designing for online? Look Offline.

If you want your website designs, or any online media design for that matter, to be new and outside the box then don’t look online. What I tend to do is grab some print design books and take a look at what’s current and working in the real world.
Product packaging is a great source of inspiration as well. There are no limits to what can be done offline, so try and take those ideas and make them work online. The end result will be a website that wont look like a template.

You can get a good start with the following few offline materials.

Movie posters/posters – impawards.com IMP Awards is a great resource for movie posters.

Book Covers – bookcoverarchive.com lets you browse hundreds of book covers from their archive. Books are excellent for inspiration. There is always a lot of artistic work in book covers.

Business Cards – Everyone should keep a business card book. Just collect them from everywhere. Take a few bad ones just to get an idea of what not to do sometimes!

DVD/Video game menu screens - These can be a great source of getting ideas for interactivity and landing pages. A lot of video game websites use a similar idea for their websites. Its all about presentation and interactive menu design for these screens.

Music cover art – sleevage.com Sleevage is a great website that is aiming to become the largest online music cover art resource. There are many ways to search and you will be sure to find some great ideas here.

Creative product packaging – There is so much funky and cool packaging around form all over the world that you can bet you will see some thing that will spark an idea. Even point of sale stands are getting creative.

Finding inspiration online.

Well you can start by browsing our website and look at other material that’s been done. At veryinspirational.com you can find website design inspiration, logo inspiration, creative photography, digital art and more.

Lastly, Spice up your desk…make it your creative home

There is nothing like getting your office space to feel like home. My desk is surrounded by lolcat printouts, Making Fiends stuff, pirates, ninjas and anything from ThinkGeek.com
Make it feel like “your place” and you will find it easier to get distracted from your office surrounds and get into the creative world of your head.

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