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31 Comments

How do you organise your design inspirations?

Hey there,
short question: How do you collect and organise your design inspirations? Whenever I find a neat app or cool graphic or interesting web site I add it to my gallery/bookmarks/notes or what not. Was wondering what's your approach to save stuff that you like to draw inspiration from it later on.

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    I screen shot it, go to my team and say I want this, what are their thoughts, how long does it take to add into my website/backend, does it align with our overall strategy, what is the opportunity cost, do we need to focus on more important things, Can we outsource it cheaply? e.g fiver

    If its for articles I just get the link to it, send it to my graphic person or I find something similar on a free inforgraphics website.

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      Thanks for the input :) I meant more like for your personal inspiration. So if you just like how something is made, and you feel as if you can draw new ideas from it later (instead of just implementing it now right away or sending it to someone in your team). Where do you store these ideas for yourself?

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        Feel free to connect with me on twitter if you want to run any ideas further with me https://twitter.com/CarlosWallhead

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        ahhh!! Well theres a number of ways! I have two huge whiteboards at home so I write it on there and look and it and think spin off ideas, talk to people, I also get inspiration from others, see how I can make it better, does it align wih my strategy...etc, is it something we need right now, if so speed vs cost vs time vs quality (Iron Trianble)

        I found this new website on here actually https://orgpad.com I commented on their landing page @klavik can help you with that further. How do you do it?

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          Just had a look at this, seems interesting but I would use it rather to brainstorm new ideas. But yes, it seems to have all required features for my original use case..

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          We don't have anything for collecting or organizing design ideas which we could show publicly. As a different usecase, you can take a look at how OrgPad can be used to organize photos into a beautiful photo gallery: https://orgpad.com/o/Cq4wzd04hJZ6JFZSCWGKU6. One can organize design ideas in a similar manner, since different types of data can be easily combined in OrgPad: text, links, images, video, attachments, etc. When one builds these visual documents, it is really easy to remember where is everything located, even after multiple months.

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      Yeah something about that - interesting features, thanks! Guess its main purpose is for pics but apparently does the job of saving nearly any inspiration... automation looks interesting too

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      I see, thanks! Is there anything that bothers you about the process or are you completely satisfied with the workflow for saving new stuff?

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        Well, is just copy paste actually no big engineering.

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    Pinterest secret boards have done the trick for me. Recently tried myMind from Van Schneider which has an interesting approach but too expensive for my use

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      Yeah I also thought about secret boards.. myMind looks super awesome though, more towards the direction where I was heading to, thanks for the tip! Pinterest clearly poses a good solution - so why did you consider myMind nonetheless? And why did you stick with Pinterest (apart from the expensive pricing of myMind)?

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        Honestly I was just curious and I'm weak against hype... But in the end the old boring way has its advantages.
        In the end I think I like having a bit of structure, that's why so far Pinterest and Notion have been more than enough for my needs.

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    I save it on my computer and then make a note to go back to it whenever I'm feeling creative.

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      Okay interesting! So I guess you use your favourite note taking app for the note and organise everything neatly.. So if I understand you correctly, you do a "right-click->save-to->select-folder" and then add some information about it to your notes app when you want to store, say, a graphic from a website? How do you do this when you are on mobile? And is there anything you cumbersome during the process?

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        I wouldn't say it's to a folder. I just save it on the desktop. But sometimes, I just have the tab open to that image. Or I screen-shot it. Then I title it "Inspo" or something like that.

        Or I put the link in Evernote- with some message to it.

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          Alright thanks for the explanation!
          Yeah Evernote is an approach I heard quite often now.

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    I'm also curious, currently building https://lookup.design to solve exactly that problem. Before I always used to take a ton of screenshots and drop them into figma to make a moodboard.

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      That looks interesting! So you collect design inspiration for your customers and they can access your content? Nice UI btw ;)

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        yep that's the idea ✨
        I got a bit frustrated when trying to find specific design inspiration like for a menu or a settings page or so. Still not sure where the project is gonna go though

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      Your link doesnt work :S

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    i use this https://en.eagle.cool/.
    by far the best that I've used. literally hooked.

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    I have tried mood and inspiration boards, note taking applications, bookmarking apps, mindmaps and pinterest but haven't found the ideal solution yet.

    https://milanote.com/ looks like it has potential but I can't justify that monthly cost.

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      Yeah quite expensive but seems pretty nice. Thanks!

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    I put it all in a nice Dropbox Paper document (https://paper.dropbox.com).. I tried at first to use tools like Figma and stuff, but in the end Dropbox Paper seemed much more practically easier to use for very large mood/design boards.

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      Never heard of that, thanks for the link :) Looks as if it's a nice solution. But I imagine adding new stuff might be a bit laborious?

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        @giorgio_gross no it's actually the opposite. You can take screenshots on your computer (Cmd+Shift+4 on Mac etc) and paste straight into Paper, you can also drag in images into the document straight from the computer, or upload them, or if it's a whole website just paste in the link and often times it gets expanded with a few words about what website it is). To me it seemed way faster after I played around with Figma and other tools for a while, and researched what kind of scrap booking things existed online. Another neat feature of Dropbox Paper is that it aligns all your images/screenshots quite nicely to make the whole collage look very nice and approachable.

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          Okay sounds straight forward... I think I'll give it a try! Yeah especially the layout makes it special, the other solutions are mostly just a pretty list of links and images.

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    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

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      Cool! Can you tell me more about the workflow you use to store new stuff? I imagine it's like copy&paste?

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