Keep track of your inspiration

Keep track of your inspiration

Stuart Horton-Stephens | 5/02/2010

As a designer , the number of website I visit, either daily, stumble upon or is recommended to me is in the hundreds each week. (not to say I don’t do any work, Mr Boss Man). This is of course a great way to feed your creative spirit with endless pages of inspiration and ideas, feel good about knowing there are like minded spirits out there just like you and that they too are spending hours trawling through it all.

However, the main issue with all this trawling is that it has a ‘wallpaper’ effect on your brain. In other words, the hundreds of images and information you are mentally downloading becomes a blur and you end up not really retaining any of it. There may be the odd image that burnt itself onto your brain (and hopefully it isn’t questionable content), but most of it trickles ever so quickly out of your ears and onto the corporate carpet, lovely that it is.

So whats the solution?

Well there are two really. First one is to bookmark all the pages. Only problem of course is that you end up with a million bookmarks which will confuse you in the end. The second solution is to use any number of freely available online tools to help you categorize and preserve these delightful inspirational snippets. Here are a couple you may like to have a look at, the first in fact lets you take photos with your iphone, upload to your account to view as a batch of ‘inspirational peices on  my way to work’ folder for later use.

http://www.evernote.com/

http://patterntap.com/

Elephants have an amazing memory. I am not an elephant.

tags: Web Design