Granted, you may find it easy to copy the style of a writer you personally like, and there’s no doubt that the type of material you and I read has a great deal to do with how we write and/or design in return, but there is a way to find you own voice to do that – there’s nothing wrong with trying to emulate a tone of a successful writer, for example, but you have to draw limits as to how close you’ll actually get to simply mimicking or parroting someone else.

Find Your Own Inspiration

The first point is really the starting point for it all – inspiration is the lighter fluid on the grill of writing… you can go on to grill whatever you want once you get all fired up. Finding your own source(s) of inspiration is good for a few reasons.

• It lets you control your own thoughts You don’t have languish through a thousand and one RSS feeds to find that One Inspired Idea (even though it’s lifted in/directly from someone else) that makes a gripping read.
• It teaches you to rely on yourself for ideasYou make yourself responsible for finding content to write about, and invariably if you do this it will not only make your blog unique by default it will help you train your mind to detect topics that might be ignored.
• You never have to run out of stuff to create Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. If you train your mind to find the topics that will populate your blog, you give yourself sustainability. You make yourself – train yourself – to become capable at discovering those topics.
• You aren’t confined by what someone else does This means not doing a “37 Best Firefox Plugins” article just because a few other writers did. If you insist on a plugins article, say it in your own voice, from your own perspective. How have they helped you in a tight project? How do they improve your workflow?

Pump Off The Rusty Water

There are days, and every creative person has them, when you have half-baked ideas that are too good to ignore but not good enough to become fleshed out into whole projects or complete designs. Often, these ideas crown out the better ones just below the surface.

Rather than discarding these ideas when they come along, get them down – either on paper or on screen. Space is cheap, and unlike notebooks (the spiral-bound wood-pulp kind, not the machined aluminum kind) doesn’t take up a whole lot of space the more you fill it. As many ideas as you have, open your notebook (either kind) and get it down. Some people (I believe it’s Danny Gregory who coined the phrase) call this “Pumping off the rusty water” because when you drill a well or let it sit stagnant for a time, the top fills up with the stuff that’s almost no good… and before you can get to the good stuff you have to pump off the rusty water (the not-so-good ideas) first.

This is good for finding your voice because it not only helps you get into the habit of getting the ideas from your head to the paper or screen, it helps you get to know your own creative process. This means that when the times comes for the Really Good Idea (or just a fast deadline) you can better understand what your process is to be productive and to get results.

Understand The Tools You Use

It takes time and practice to become well-enough acquainted with a tool to just sit down and let things happen – without having to think or re-teach yourself how to do something. For example, if you have this fantastic idea for a logo and need to get it into the computer, do you understand the Pen Tool enough to whip up a quick sketch of how it looks?

We learn how to use a pen from the moment we’re able to grip one of those big baby crayons (those Yankee Stadium-sized hot dog ones) we start learning to handle a pen – so when the time comes to jot a note or doodle a design it comes natural enough to just pick up the pen and “open the gates,” so to speak. Having an equally comfortable knowledge of the software you use is the much the same – whether this is Photoshop, Illustrator, or GIMP (…did I just include GIMP on ThisIsInspired? O_o). Or Coda. Whatever tool(s) you use, try to make yourself as easy with it as possible, not only in the basics but in some of the way cooler, more advanced ways as well; there are tutorials a-plenty for it all there’s no excuse not to.

Be Content With Your Own Style

Don’t become so bogged down on what others do – either their topics, their style, or their success – that you lose the focus on who you are, who you want to become, and what you want your blog to be.

Trying to force yourself to be something you’re not is a waste of effort, time, and vision. Not to mention if you really rip someone off you can be slapped with plagiarism. Know what you want to do, and where you want to be – and then take only the steps you need to so your blog gets there in the end. The energy you save in not taking unnecessary steps can be directed into improving your social connection, your readership, and your reach.

Leave Competition At the Door

Creative things have very little room for competition, really. Talent, yes, maybe, but creativity cannot be forced. Comparing yourself to someone else is detrimental because in most people’s minds they’ll be that good. I’d love for ThisIsInspired to have the readership of Fabio Sasso’s Abduzeedo, but I don’t obsess over becoming Abduzeedo because we do entirely different things – and even if I wanted it to, ThisIsInspired would never in a million years be able to match him. He has his own voice and this blog has it’s own, whisper-like as it might be at this point.

My point is if you can’t match someone else verbatim, and you can’t no matter how hard you try, why compare yourself to them? Your effort is much better spent finding your own way your own way. In the end, you have richer experiences with which is help your readers and better fodder for topics and articles.

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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#1: Don’t Try Too Hard

The truth is, it seems, the harder we try to do something the harder or longer it takes to get it going. Sometimes the solution is staring us right in the face and we’re too close to see it.

So, get your mind active on something else – something different or something related doesn’t matter, just something else. If you’re trying to get a layout to come together (and it won’t) switch speeds a bit and try coding for a while, or switch gears altogether and watch the birds out the window.

Hint, hint: Don’t open up Wikipedia, because you’ll lose a few hours before you know it.

#2: Pump Off the Rusty Water

Creative author Danny Gregory says everyone needs to “pump off the rusty water” to get to the fresh stuff, creatively speaking. So instead of switch gears entirely (#1, above) and rather than working on the same project do something else creative. Why do you think so many personal spaces of fellow designers have a guitar hanging on the wall? Going from code creation to music creation can be a great way to stay in the creative groove without letting your mind go numb from repetitive tasks or troubleshooting.

#3: Give Your Brain a Break

Thinking too hard can, literally, make your head hurt. If you’re running in circle over a design, over a layout, a piece of code, a project proposal, whatever, try walking away from it completely – but don’t move on to something else. Make another cup of coffee or tea, and take ten minutes to sit and enjoy unwinding your mind. ten minutes won’t make or break a project, and the rejuvenation will probably help you work faster or resolve issues easier once you get back to work.

#4: Interact With Other People

Oftentimes the reason the brain gets wound up so tight is because it’s too focused on one tiny, minute detail or task. Interacting with others forces you to break out of that mode and use an entirely different part of the brain: Language and communication, not art and creativity. If you work with others in an office, take three minutes and banter (if they’re also in brain-dead mode), or, if allowed by your employer, go use the communal foosball or pool table for a few minutes. Just get up, get away for a bit and interact.

Why do you think so many design houses and/or major companies have game rooms? Parliament, in Portland, Oregon, has a pool table smack-plunk in the middle of their studio.

#5: I was Going to Say Power Nap, But You Already Knew That

…and then there are times when the brain is just tired and needs to reboot. Forget forty winks – even if you only grab a handful of winks you can give the brain a literal shut down and come back on more powered up than before. Sleep clears the head. The brain can think better, plan better, create better when it’s rested.

This isn’t a new thought; there are many people – creative or otherwise – who recognize the power of a quick nap. The relevant thing isn’t that “because you’re asleep you’re wasting time” it’s “after I snooze I think better and work more efficiently.”

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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Pen & Paper

Everything starts with a pen and paper. Okay, not everything but just about everything. We jot, we doodle, we sketch, and out of these little creative ramblings we figure out what direction to take with a design and what we’ll work up for a client.

We all have our favourites tools for this part of the project. I prefer a blank pad and a fine G2 Rollerball, but I’ve seen designers use fountain pens and artists’ pencils. Some of us get pretty involved in this phase and bring in a collection of writing and doodling tools that to everyone else might make us look like a professional sketch artist or painter (well, I guess we are professional sketchers, in a sense).

Some of our sketches are so in-depth we can show them to the client and get some initial feedback before we ever even turn on the computer, but mostly, it’s these little first sketches that help us work out the problems with certain designs and put together the pros & cons of each one. As the saying goes, “The Journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step” we could say “The launch of a major website begins with the first sketch.” It’s kind of cool, and also at the same time kind of humbling, to realize that no matter what the scale of the project is – from Nike and Starbucks – each one starts off as a little sketch on someone’s pad. From what small acorns, eh?

Photoshop or Fireworks (or both)

Okay, maybe Photoshop isn’t what you use – maybe you prefer Fireworks (which is experiencing a bit of an upswing among certain designers) – but the second step, after finalizing a design on paper is to turn to software. We’ve worked out a design, put it on paper, identified key areas, buckets, possible problems to work around, etcetera, and now we need to turn it in a living visual creation.

So we open Photoshop or Fireworks and get to work taking those final sketches we came up with in the first phase and making it a workable, codable design. In this part of the project we might identify what areas would be harder (or close to impossible) to develop, and work out ways around it. The Photoshop Phase works very closely with the Coda Phase because because as we create the design in the software we have to constantly keep in mind what’s possible, what’s pushing the envelope, what’s not possible and what we know is possible but we might have trouble with. Sticking to the grid makes our Photoshop Phase lives a bit easier, but even then we can jump and dance in creativity and have fun working out what problems we might foresee.

We mark out content buckets, identify any area that will use AJAX or some other script-heavy dynamic (if such exists in the given project), and get everything sliceable and diceable for Phase Three.

It’s funny to think that some designers choose to stay in the Pen & Paper period even while they mock up the design graphically and develop it. They use handwriting fonts, torn-paper edges, and all sorts of visual tricks to keep the design looking like it’s still on the desk of the designer. We’ve all seen websites that aren’t so smooth and polished (in the strictest, most class-conscious sense of the word) and we enjoy these because they break from the monotony of bevels, buttons and all-caps Helvetica.

The Photoshop Phase is kind of like making an origami balloon – in the Sketch Phase we picked the paper and made our first creases in that paper. Now, we get to work folding it up. Then, as we develop it and make it workable, navigable and accessible it’s like breathing life into it and filling it out.

Coda or Textmate

I prefer Coda (as you may know), but both Coda and Textmate are very popular, and very worthy, apps for taking our little folded origami balloon and blowing it up into a 3D object we can actually play with.

In the prior phases, we’ve identified what scripting will be involved and we’ve got in mind how we’ll start cutting up the layout. Here’s where all that thinking and cudgeling of the brain pays off. We start with a blank document – a simple XHTML layout with key areas defined or, literally, a blank document. Some of us type our DOCTYPES by hand, most don’t. Most of us work with a shell document with all the basics right there waiting and we tailor it to suit our project.

But into this shell we build, bit by bit, what will be the foundation of the website. Ninety-nine percent of people don’t ever even see all the stuff we code behind the scenes, but slowly, slowly in the Coda Phase we inject a bit of CSS here, an additional HTML element there until we’ve got it together. Gone are the days when we think in terms of spacer GIFs (thank goodness) and empty table cells.

From a blank document springs something that can capture the eye, engage the hand, and spark the brain.

As we develop, we learn and we teach ourselves. Every time I’ve cut up a design I’ve found a better way to do something – to accomplish a certain task more easily, to get a certain aspect of it more streamlined. Little fine-tuning things we ourselves learn from and benefit from.

Sometimes we might be proactive and find Sketch Phase or Photoshop Phase ways to make this final one a bit easier. We teach ourselves, through experience and through repetition, how to become better designers and developers.

From our initial little sketch we can teach the viewer.

That little doodle we started with way back there can inspire the viewer to take action and to learn.

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

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