The Inspiration Process

In our industry, we use the word inspiration a lot. One of our jobs as a creative person is to provide an inspiration process to our clients as well as our clients’ clients. Also as a creative person, we crave inspiration and often find ourselves on a journey for said inspirado. Whether that journey is seeking inspiration for design, copywriting, typography, video, music, or even for our everyday lives, it is highly sought after and fortunately for us, we have the Internet. Yes, nearly every minute of our lives we have a plethora of inspiration at our fingertips (thank you, Internet, you’ve come through again), but with all of this inspiration floating around in cyberspace, how in the hell do we keep track of it and organize it so we can use it later? I may have an answer for that.

I’m going to take you through a typical project inspiration process for a client project and hopefully you can use some, or all of the tips, tools, and sites in your day-to-day inspiration gathering.

So it’s another great day at nvision and we just completed our internal kickoff for a new client project! The project consists of web redesign and development and copywriting to match their newly revamped brand. At this time I’m going to prepare for a client kickoff – we like to have the project lead touch base with the client one more time before starting any design or major project planning just in case we missed anything. Before I talk with the client, I like to seek out some inspiration from sites and brands that are similar to the client’s – I may come across some valuable functionality or see something cool that I’ll want to bring up with the intention of getting client buy-in before taking the next steps – off to trusty Google I go to look up their competition and seek out other sites in their industry. Most of the time, the competition, and industry websites are outdated, poorly designed and developed and provide little to no inspiration. So off to my trusty collection of sites to help jumpstart the creative juices.

The sites and resources below play an intricate part in my day-to-day and I hope they can help you as much as they do me.

Where to search

AWWWARDS

The AWWARDS awards recognize the world’s best talent in terms of web design and development. Sites are judged on four categories; design, creativity, usability, and content. The site provides filtering by category, tag, and even colour and is a great resource for high-end website inspiration.

Highlights

• Website design inspiration
• Resource blog
• Job postings
• Available member registration

Land Book

A simple gallery of landing pages. This site is a collection of homepages and campaign pages that not only depict great design, but they also display effective ways of converting users – join the beta testing group, sign up for an account, start a free trial, share socially, etc.

Highlights

• Website design inspiration
• Resource blog
• Excellent conversion examples

Designspiration

Designspiration is a site to help you discover and share great design. It provides the ability to search and filter by colour, among other things.

Highlights

• Overall design inspiration – all types of pieces
• Job postings
• Optional member registration
• Create your own collections

How to organize all this new inspiration

There are numerous methods and programs out there to help you organize your inspiration but here are two to help … these are my favourite.

Ember

Ember makes it incredibly easy to collect photos and other images that inspire you, curate and organize them, and sync them across all your favourite Apple devices.

Highlights

• Take photos, import from camera roll/finder
• iCloud access
• RSS
• Organize inspiration pieces based on the client project, tags. Colours
• Colour search
• Save website within the app or from Safari or Chrome
• Screenshots, Sharing, Drawing and more

Icebergs

A private place in the cloud for you and your team to organize your projects, research, and inspiration.

Highlights

• Save images, text, videos, and websites with browser plugins (Chrome, Safari & Firefox)
• Ability to highlight areas of high importance on captures
• Team collaboration
• Affordable pricing, and a free account (basic)

I wish you luck in your inspirational journey. I also invite you to share your favourite inspiration resources and cataloging apps. Don’t forget that inspiration can be found everywhere you look, just be sure to open your eyes … and have your iPhone ready to capture it, of course!