How do you find inspiration?

[PistolPete]

So as some of you might remember I embarked on a somewhat foolish idea to produce a new poster for my open mic night every week during 2017 as a personal challenge & social media gimmick.

Somewhat predictably, 8 months in I'm finding it harder & harder to come up with new angles on the same event.

I'm just curious as to how those of you who do this for a living deal with finding new ideas for the stuff you do day in & day out. I assume you must have moments when your heart sinks when another menu for a trendy craft beer & BBQ establishment* lands on your desk?




*substitute 'book jacket for a fantasy novel'; 'flyer for an Indian takeaway'; 'baked bean tin label' etc as appropriate...

 

[scotty]

I'm a bit obsessed with design inspiration and I can and do spend all day on the net looking.
"Where did another day go?"

I find the best way go getting targeted inspiration and reference is Pinterest, hands down.

If you don't use it, you start an account and list some of the things that interest you and then start pinning and making boards.

You'll end up with different boards for different things. Some of mine ate typography, illustration, character design and so on.
The cool thing is that when you click on an image you like, it then shows below LOADS of images that are similar with the same/similar tags and you can go on from there getting more and more targeted.
It then selects images that are similar to the ones on your boards so you have a nice new batch to view every day.

A point in case.
I've recently been working on creating murals and prints for a Chinese restaurant chain and I needed a lot of old Chinese newspaper/typography reference which were not easy to find as you'd think as they're often on Chinese (in Chinese) sites so Google didn't pick them up from my searches.
I set up a board and pinned a few through a normal search and from there you can really go down a bit of a rabbit warren.

From the images you can go to the sites they're hosted on which then can open up more and more.

I find it pretty invaluable.

 

[scotty]

...and to add:

You can also access other peoples boards that have assembled collections of similar things already.
It never ends!