The secret to a never-ending flow of design ideas
Looking for design inspirations to get the creative juices flowing?
It’s important to have a library of ideas to turn to whenever you need a fresh perspective, but it can be tough to find and store design inspiration when juggling multiple projects and deadlines. Not to mention, having a collection of design inspirations can help refine your skills and personal style, so you can make cool, unique designs that will really wow people!
Building a second brain is a cool way to get organized and store all your stuff — physical and digital. It’s a great way to manage your life and work more efficiently, and can even be used as a library of design ideas.
Applying the principles of building a second brain makes it easy to gather, organize and store design inspirations. That way, you’ll always have a ready source of creativity right at your fingertips!
Remember, Connect, Create: these are the three steps you need to take to build your “second brain”, a concept Tiago Forte talks about in his book “Building a Second Brain”. Basically, it’s a system for capturing, storing, and organizing all the ideas, thoughts, and info you come across so you can easily access them later and use them to inspire your work.
- Remember — take in the info.
- Connect — organize it in a meaningful way.
- Create — use the info to come up with new ideas and projects.
By doing this, you create a personal knowledge management system that helps you be more productive, creative, and efficient. Sounds pretty cool, right?
Capture
When it comes to building your second brain, the first thing to do is to find tons of design inspiration from all over the place. Get creative and don’t limit yourself — scour the internet, check out different platforms — the possibilities are endless!
If you’re looking to curate designs from websites like Twitter, Dribbble, Instagram, and LinkedIn, then Are.na and Pinterest are great options. Both are great for saving and organizing images and designs from different sites into collections or boards, so you can easily keep track of your inspirations and quickly find what you’re looking for.
Are.na
Are.na is a powerful tool for curating and organizing design inspirations and other forms of creative content. Several key features make it an ideal tool for design curation.
One of the best features is Connections. It allows you to link related blocks together, creating a web of interconnected ideas and inspirations. This makes it easy to see the relationships between different pieces of content and explore different design styles.
Pinterest is a popular platform for content creators and designers, and several key features make it an ideal tool for design curation.
Pinterest’s “More Ideas” feature is a powerful tool that suggests additional Pins related to the Pin you’re viewing. This helps you discover new design inspirations and explore different design styles.
Now that we know how to curate, let’s find some awesome design inspo! To get an idea of the latest trends, we usually check out these sites for a bit of eye-candy and functionality.
Dribbble — Discover the World’s Top Designers & Creative Professionals
5443 Landing Page Design Inspiration — Lapa Ninja
One Page Love — One Page Website Inspiration and Templates
Land-book — website design inspiration gallery
These sites show off the newest web designs that are sure to get your creative juices flowing and give you some fresh ideas. Plus, they’re great spots to find out what kinds of design elements top sites are using, so you know what design trends are hot right now.
Mood board
Once you’ve got a bunch of design ideas, it’s time to turn them into a visual. You can do this by making a moodboard — a collage of images, colours and text that reflects the kind of design style you’re going for. You can create a moodboard with digital tools like Canva or Adobe Creative Cloud, or if you’re into the old-school approach, you can do it with paper and scissors.
Milanote
Milanote is the ultimate visual workspace for content creators and designers. It’s perfect for organising your work and ideas, plus it has this awesome feature that lets you include GIFs, so it’s great for making moodboards too!
GIFs are great! Milanote makes it really easy to add them to your moodboards and bring your design inspirations and ideas to life. You can use them to create a mood, convey a tone, or give your moodboard some style. It’s super simple and so worth it!
Once your moodboard is done, it’s time to take a look and make sure it captures the design style you want. It’s an important step to make sure everything’s good before you make any final changes.
Integrate capturing into daily habits
It’s definitely worth taking the time to keep your design inspiration library up to date. To make it easier, why not form a daily habit of curating new design inspirations and refining existing moodboards? James Clear talks about this in his book, Atomic Habits, and he calls it ‘habit stacking’. It’s a great way to make it easier to pick up new habits.
If you already have a daily commute, why not add a few minutes of design inspiration curation to the mix? Habit stacking means that you can easily integrate new habits into existing ones — like collecting and organizing some design inspo every day. It’s a simple way to make sure you’re always getting inspired!
Take a few minutes each day to save and sort out the design ideas you find online. Anything from Instagram pics to Dribbble designs — keep it all in one place and spend a few minutes each day organizing them into your design inspiration library.
Wrapping it up, creating a design inspiration library following the principles of building a second brain is a great way to organize your design ideas and get your creative juices flowing. Collect inspiration from different places, lay it out in a visual format, and keep refining it — you’ll have a ton of design inspiration ready to go for whenever you need it!
It’s always a good idea to get inspiration from a variety of sources. That way, you can be sure to never be limited to one type of design. Plus, having a library of design inspiration to draw from can help keep your creativity flowing and get you motivated. So make sure to always explore and find new sources of design inspiration!
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