design inspiration to clear the creative fog.
Creative block is the worst! Whenever I need help to kick start my creative mindset I often turn to books or online resources to help get the juices flowing. Below I’ll share some of my go to design inspo pages.
One of my many Pinterest boards.
The obvious staring point here is Pinterest. But that only works if you’ve curated your own stuff over the years, Pinterest does an amazing job at seeing what you already have and feeds it back to you in other visual ways, but sometimes that doesn’t cut it. I also find it can often get a bit repetitive.
So what do you do when that’s not working?
Screenshot from https://anothergraphic.org/
Another Graphic is a beautiful website, its based on experimental typography and is absolutely bursting with inspiration work from designers around the world, each with their own unique style. I’ve literally got it bookmarked on my browser so that I can grab some brain waves on the fly. It’s a visual feast, curated and laid out in such a way that you won’t know what to look at first.
Screenshot from https://www.fuse.kiwi/
Fuse is a growing collection of creative reference and digital entertainment. It’s honestly a bit of a rabbit hole, each image you click on takes you to other resources which I find is a rarity for these sort of websites. It’s constantly updated so you’ll always have tons of inspiration work to look at.
Screenshot from https://www.itsnicethat.com/
If you’ve made it to this point of the internet, reading one of my hidden blog posts then you probably already know about It’s nice that. But if you don’t then you should, it’s probably the number one site for inspiration, design news, resources and showing you “nice stuff”. It’s brilliantly curated, they also have newsletters which I’d highly recommend signing up to for daily doses of inspiration.
Screenshot from https://type-01.com/
Type 01 is the leading platform for publishing type-focus media. They have their website where they posts news and updates on all things design, they regularly interview up and coming designers which is super helpful. They sell a multitude of amazing fonts and to top it all off they print beautiful magazines that I’d 1000% recommend! As a huge fan of all things print and type, it’s the perfect book to add to your collection. But if getting the real deal isn’t your thing you can even download their e-mags!
Screenshot from https://trendlist.org/
Trend List is exactly what it says on the tin. Documenting design trends since 2011, it cleverly allows you to see as much or as little on the page at one time. It’s a little overwhelming at first but it’s really just all individual images that will allow you to pick up the odd idea for your work. What’s interesting though is the ability to see the year something was made.
Screenshot from https://designreviewed.com/1990s-graphic-design-history/
This was actually one that I discovered by accident, it turned out I followed this account on Instagram that every now and then would post these amazing scans of old graphics. Turned out it was this website called Design Reviewed, the site is ran by a Matt Lamont who’s spent over a decade amassing a collection of printed materials that he shares. If you’re looking to explore older design styles and techniques then this is the perfect site for you. Sadly a lot of it is hidden behind paywalls, which is fair enough for such a body of work! But you can still get snippets of some of the designs if you click around the site.
