I’m always looking for design inspiration. Lately, I’ve been finding a lot of it at graphic exchange. Most of the work posted here is print based, and tends towards exotic textures. There is a HUGE collection of work here, so be careful, or you might get lost for a while.
As an aside, the site doesn’t have an RSS feed. What’s up with that?
Kevin O’Keefe hosts the weekly Blawg Review, and focuses on the “art of blogging”. He features a number of seminal posts from the likes of Dave Winer, Duncan Riley, my friends Susannah Gardner, Darren Rowse, and many more blogging luminaries.
Speaking of Darren, he’s asking for questions about blogging to answer at problogger over the next couple of months.
Blog Action Day is coming up on October 15th. The site’s mission states “On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.”
Completely unrelated to blogging, check out Bloxorz, a simple yet highly addictive free game.
During an interview with Darren Rowse, SEO expert Aaron Wall responds to the following question: How is blogging important to your overall business?
It is huge. Where others are buying $5,000 booths at conferences and spending $500 a day on AdWords my marketing spend is next to nothing because I get many sales from people talking about me. Plus blogging got me media exposure which makes it easier to get more media exposure down the road. I was a no name SEO with one popular article before I started SEO Book, but now I have thousands of subscribers and thousands of customers. The single most important part of my business right now is blogging.
Check out the latest video from Birds of Wales (featuring our very own Mike Caputo on guitar).
There’s a certain inevitable repetition that comes from being a specialist designer. Whether it’s brochures, business cards, or blogs, there are sets conventions and content that appear time and again. Keeping each project fresh and distinctive requires a steady outward flow of creativity. Fueling that creativity is that most elusive and intangible state: inspiration.
Inspiration as fuel is a fitting metaphor. It’s required to power the engine that cranks out great design. Unlike fuels derived from a single source (say, gasoline), inspiration can come from a myriad of places.
I get my inspiration from fiction, music, print design, art, and nature. I’m hugely inspired by the act of inspiration that went into creating the thing I behold. When I read fiction, I think about the fact that another human sat down and drew together characters and a plot. When I look at art, I think about the movement of the artist as he translated a blank canvas into a finished piece. For me, the inspiration comes not from the the piece that I read, see, or hear, but from the act of creation that brought it to be.
In that sense, what I do is recycle. I get inspired by inspiration, and use that energy to fuel the birth of something new.
What about you? What are your sources of inspiration?