Writer’s block. Creative constipation. Mental block. These phrases are just fancy ways of saying something simple: you’re stuck.
There’s nothing wrong with being stuck, since it happens to the best of us. But there are several reasons to get yourself moving again, especially if it’s unreasonable to do the usual routine of going for a long walk or bringing your laptop to the coffee shop. There are deadlines, paychecks, impatient clients, and, more importantly, the simple internal drive to do the work.
But how can you do it if you can’t get started?
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As a former designer who still dabbles in the odd piece of commercial or hobbyist work, I’m sometimes stuck at the inception of a project, trying to discover the initial creative sparks that ignite a design, for those fragments of inspiration that set out the path from a blank Photoshop document to a living design.
Nine years ago as an interactive designer in a multimedia agency, designers would post various items we liked -magazine clippings, flyers, business cards, websites - onto a physical noticeboard that we could glance up at for inspiration. Over time, this grew organically into a wonderful design resource for the studio.
These days, my equivalent is a folder on my MacBook desktop called ‘Design Bin’ - I screenshot or scan a design I think might be inspirational in future and dump it in my design bin. However simple, this resource is growing in volume but diminishing in context - and in a connected era - is strangely unsociable.
Enter Scrnshots, a web-based service that lets designers share their inspirations by posting screenshots of interesting designs to a Flickr-esque web site.
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