How to get rid of ‘Designer’s Block’

When feeling ‘designer’s block’ my number one advice to clients and colleagues is to GET OUT OF THE HOUSE–out from behind the computer, and go explore your town– colors, shapes, silhouettes, typography and inspirational copy is all around us.  Traveling is an amazing way to get creative juices flowing again, but one doesn’t need to get on a plane and go to a far-away place to get recharged. Your own city or town is chalk full of inspiration- murals, museums, liquor bottles, menus, bulletin boards, book stores

It pays to research offline when researching everything–but especially typography and graphics. Having an iphone has helped me tremendously in this regard because it’s easy to take decent photos, be kinda sneeky if need be, and because I always have my phone on me, I never miss a chance to take a snap shot.

Here are my latest shots around town of graphics– some vintage, some contemporary, some serif, some sans, some curly, some burly– all inspiring for current or future projects. Another fun thing to do after taking some snaps is to upload them to www.whatthefont.com and see if there is a matching font in their database. It doesn’t always find a perfect match, but often times it will come up with comparable fonts. One of the other things I like to do is swatch the colors off of the photos– for example, I shot the above dots photo during a slide show at Creative Mornings and recently used the color palate for a client’s logo.

So when I’m feeling uninspired, what I DON’T do is sit around checking the same ol’ blogs. (Okay, I do do that sometimes, but I try not to.) I get my handy dandy iphone and I hit the town…