Doing creative work with a low inspiration battery is difficult and not fun. It happens to everybody. After a lot of trial and error and stubborn resilience, you find ways to jump start your work flow. They don’t always work, but here are five places I go from time to time when I need a boost.
1. Wear Palettes is one of the first places I go. Specifically, I tend to focus my attention on the Street Color blog. They take street fashion photography and derive color palettes from the photos. I have started a handful of projects with nothing more than one of these palettes.
2. No surprises, here: FFFFOUND! FFFFOUND! is a blog of random imagery that has been, appropriately, found online. It’s great for casual users, but as you go deeper, the site becomes a hassle to navigate. It kind of feels like the internet version of 52-card pick-up. Stressful, but produces unique results.
3. Abduzeedo is a blog out of Brazil that does basically what I am doing right now. They have a series of posts properly titled “Daily Inspiration” that collect pieces of visual inspiration. Lots of great art and design, but it comes with the price of all having a similar feel/aesthetic overall. Also, the load time is pretty rough with the overwhelming amount of images on each single post.
4. Another one that should come as no surprise: NOTCOT. It is a collection of anything and everything interesting. Anybody can submit something, if it gets approved it’ll show up on the blog. NOTCOT is an incredible place to use as a home base while you jet around the internet.
5. Vimeo is to Youtube as Facebook is to Myspace. It’s ultimately the same concept, but it is done with a care for aesthetics. The users on Vimeo are generally more art-driven and the content, on average, has more substance than a lot of other video sites. The community is strong and it is easy to stumble into intriguing video niches.
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