How to Manage Your Inspiration
Posted in Random on: Tuesday, September 8, 2009 by Paul Boag
How do you find your design inspiration? More importantly how do you manage those sources of inspiration?
At Headscape we believe in including our clients throughout the design process. We also don’t like to jump straight into design comps. Instead we prefer to look for elements that can potentially inspire the development of our client’s sites.
The question is, how to manage all of these design elements?
13 Comments
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Aaaaaand the link to this software is …?
Here, let me google that for you.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.realmacsoftware.com%2Flittlesnapper%2F
Great tip – I’ve started using “Image Spark” but the whole web page capture looks like something I could use and is missing from I.S.
Janez – try http://www.google.com It’s great for finding things instantly – even quicker than it took you to post your reply! ;D
Great tips Paul, thanks. Have been using Little Snapper for a while now, and organise it in a similar way to yourself … but I have not (yet) been using it to guide / interact with clients. There’s a part of me that wants to avoid it – I know that some clients will just say ‘why can’t we use that image/design/layout’ … and then I’m caught in a conversation regarding inspiration vs. plagiarism! :) But this is a good part of the process, I think.
Also, was at FOWD, Belfast, last week where Malarkey was talking about designing inside the browser – ditching photoshop/fireworks from the design process (or rather, from the part of the process that interfaces with the client) and I think integrating something like this could help the work methods he was describing.
Good stuff. David.
Excellent video, thanks Paul.
I love nicking bits and bobs off the various sites I discover on my travels, but have always ended up with images scattered all over the shop – and am unable to locate them ever again :).
This looks like a great solution – I just wish I had a Mac now :).
There seems to be a snapper for Windows, but no app unfortunately – still, Ember looks like it’ll be great for inspiration.
Thanks, Dan
Thanks Paul .. a nice show again..
Ember can be found here: http://emberapp.com/
LittleSnapper can be found here: http://www.realmacsoftware.com/littlesnapper/
Great advice as ever Paul. I use a similar method for windows that involves a combination of the screengrab extension for firefox and dropbox. This ensures I can always get access to my sources of inspiration regardless of my location. I will certainly use your method once I have purchased my first mac in a few months time. Keep up the good work. Phil
some time a go you mentioned something like this on your podcast and it was a different program (i cant remember the name) and you also recommended using microsoft office OneNote where you can basically capture in a simular way
though this littleSnapper seems to me much more pleasing (from the video it looks like the itunes player)
is there anything like this for windows
great topic
Awesome! I’ve been using Little Snapper for a bit now but didn’t even know about the Ember site.
Could you link us to the Flickr feed you mentioned?
And how about this Patrick Haley chap – Google doesn’t seem to be helping me with his flickr feed…
That is because his name is Patrick Haney :)
did not mean to add the comment there Sorry!