♾️ How to Get Unlimited Creative Inspiration · The Bunker #15

Let’s get started!

The topic of inspiration has always been something I have had to struggle with on a daily basis, and a really interesting and relevant topic for me, as working in the creative sector I find it very curious to know how everyone has their own way of getting inspired, what methodologies, platforms they use, etc.

Many times I have felt unable to create new pieces, and in addition to mental health, habits, routine, practice, experience and so on, your resource repository also comes into play (we have already talked about this in other posts), a place where you store all the resources you find interesting and then consume them to get the inspiration you need to solve certain problems.

Inspiration comes from observing and consuming a lot, basically. And you can do that by Googling or by starting from a repository that you can grow over time.

😩Even so, sometimes I have felt blocked and unable to create new pieces, and this has made me wonder many times if it is because my repository was not always enough or my protocol to get inspiration was not sufficiently optimised. The reality is that I was simply overwhelmed, my repository works whenever I need it, because over time I have been able to optimise my creative process (which takes time and if you want to talk about it in another post).

😋Well, like everything in my work, I have a bit of an obsession with the methodologies that I share with other creatives, I'm very curious to know how someone is able to create 500 completely different pieces without running out of resources (they never run out, it's a barrier that we put up for ourselves). In short, how someone is able to have the capacity to produce creatively on a constant basis.

I am referring to Jordan Hughes, known in the community for many things, among them:

• He is the founder of Untitled UI, the largest library or design system in Figma.
• He does the 365-day design challenge. Basically, every day he creates a new piece and shares it on Dribbble and Twitter. These designs he creates are based on Untitled UI.

As I told you in previous posts, when you are curious about something, when you don't know something, what do you do? You ask. So that's what I did, I asked.

I literally asked him: “We've seen that you have a very large portoflio on Dribbble, every week you upload content, and it's always different. Among designers, how or where do you get your inspiration? What are your platforms, tricks or secrets to store inspiration. As we know, it is very difficult to start designing on a completely blank canvas and it is always advisable to start with something. When you see something you like, do you store it in a Notion or something like that? Could you share with me a bit of your creative process, references and so on?”

To which he replied: (I will try to leave his answers as literal as possible so that there is no doubt of misrepresentation or anything like that, no one to explain better than himself).

“I get this question a lot! Usually Dribbble, Pinterest, or actual products.”

🏋️‍♀️Base your designs on real designs. As we have always said, a good way to take your designs to a higher and certainly realistic level is basically to focus on real designs. If you design for mobile, you have Mobbin, a fantastic tool that allows you to seek inspiration solely from real examples. In Jordan's case, one technique he does to surround himself with realistic content is to join free trials of interesting products to study how they have been designed.

👑Pinterest is King: “I always have Pinterest installed in my browser so if I see something interesting I’ll save it for later.”. Realmente la clave de Pinterest son dos cosas:

1. All content from Dribbble, Behance and so on is included in Pinterest. Pinterest can read content from other sites and incorporate it all in one place.
2. It has an amazing algorithm to show you similar content. Which is super useful when you're doing moodboards or very specific tasks. Jordan also uses Google's Pinterest extension, which allows you to save content within Pinterest boards, without necessarily being on Pinterest, and then benefit from the algorithm when you need it, or to collect all that inspiration or resources in one place.

🔍Collect all your inspiration in Figma and analyse it from a distant perspective: “Then I’ll spend 15mins trawling through similar Pinterest pins or Dribbble for more great examples and collate them in a new Figma file for inspiration before I even start. Combining different ideas always leads to new ideas. I only spend 1-2 days per fortnight working on portfolio shots so I find it most effective to batch this work together.”

The interesting thing here is that it collects the information and instead of leaving it in different tabs on the internet, it collects it in a single document. I personally do the same when I do web projects, basically because it allows me to see several web pages at once and allows me to draw with lines, colours, etc. the structure it will have, highlighting the interesting parts ("Well, I like this of this design, I like this of this other design"). This allows me to have a global peripheral vision of what I am analysing in order to be able to execute my proposal.

🧘‍♂️Focus: “One thing I’m very mindful of when working on this stuff is focus. If I’m working on this, I have to make sure I’m focused on churning out the highest-quality work I can produce as fast as possible, not just wandering around the internet looking for inspiration. Deep Work by Cal Newport is a book that taught me the value of this superpower early on in my career (long before design).”

There is really little more to add, it’s pretty clear, it’s not a matter of dedicating the whole week to one concept, find your most efficient concentration moments throughout the day and execute the tasks.

I hope you have enjoyed this new format, and if you would like me to bring in new people to reinforce the topics we cover each week, please let me know.

Cheers, Jordi Espinosa.