How to find inspiration and not lose uniqueness

Pokras Lampas

Many people do not understand one very important thing in their work:

Outstanding creativity is not a result of inspiration, but the result of many years of work, in which you analyze the projects of the best designers, practice regularly and make sense of progress.

Therefore, those who suffer from a lack of inspiration will certainly lose to those who do not expect it and daily hone their skills.

Innovation is a combination of existing ideas, not the creation of new ones. Consequently, the best ideas are created by designers who are able to use the accumulated experience to solve a specific problem.

Inspiration, of course, is useless. Our goal is to generate ideas.

Ideas do not arise from the air. They can be copied, but this process cannot be called generation.

Novice designers, for the most part, copy, because they do not have enough experience to create their ideas. And that's fine.

Creating something new is happening on the basis of the existing one, so at the start of a career, the designer needs to explore other people's work, adopting logic and style.

Having understood the basic patterns and best practices, it will be easier for you to generate new interface solutions without changing user habits.

Accumulation of experience

Practice in any field is an ideal option for learning, but at the same time, one should not ignore the experience of other people. Below I will give two ways to use it to accelerate their own development.

Visual selections

Reading books, I'm afraid to miss a good thought, so I always take notes . The same in design. Seeing a good solution, I want to save it and use it in further work.

The best tool for me was Pinterest, where at the start of my career I had collected a lot of interesting works, broken down into categories.

I regularly went to Dribbble / Behance and as soon as I met a sensible solution, I added it to Pinterest to the appropriate “board”, for example, “mobile profile”. And as soon as I had to deal with the creation of a profile page, I turned to this collection first and foremost.

One of the best examples -  Pinterest Yuri Vetrovwhere thousands of concepts are collected, divided into many categories. A little later, I even refused to keep my collections and, if necessary, I use the work of Yuri.

Sometimes, to grasp the new topic you do not need years of practice, and you just have to look at a few dozen works in this topic.

Materials

I came to Medium a few years ago and during that time it turned from an unknown platform into an authoritative knowledge base.

The largest design teams run their blogs here and share their experience in designing large services. Among the design teams, I note Facebook , Google , Dropbox . Outside Medium , check out the AirBnB , InVision and IDEO blogs .

There are a lot of blogs, so I prefer not to waste time searching for useful content and trust this business to “ Product Design Digest ” (unless I’m not looking for specific information).

But do not blindly copy the tips, even if they come from a reputable source. Each product is unique and one solution may work fine for them, but it will absolutely not work for you. Based on this, select materials that fit your needs.

And believe that in your niche you are able to come up with the best design solution in the world.

Generation of ideas

It is impossible to separate the stage of accumulation of experience and the generation of ideas. Everything happens in parallel. Professional activity is not a university where you have been giving a theory for several years, and then you get into the real world.

Therefore, the more you learn and use knowledge, the more you train your mind to generate new ideas. It's like in humor. It seems that everything happens spontaneously, but every joke has its own genre and structure.

Also in the works. The more you think about solving a problem, the more your brain finds ways to use your experience. And it is logical that the more experience, the more ideas you may have.

The main thing is not just to accumulate them, but also to use them regularly.

It is this thing that separates theorists from practitioners, and it is this thing that makes an ordinary specialist professional.

Whom I become and wish you.