ScrnShots: Tools for Inspiration
May 6th, 2008 (11:00am) Imran Ali 6 Comments
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.
Tags: design, flickr, Inspiration, photoshop, Web Application
