I think that being a serious designer is something that you grow to be as opposed to just wanting to be one. I know from my experience growing up that I knew what inspiration was quite early on and I gravitated towards those things that inspired me.

I use to love going to the grocery store with my parents every week because I could go to the music shop and check out all the album covers and posters until they were done shopping. When I got home I would instantly go to my room and try to recreate what I had just seen.

I always wished I had a copy of these images to work from but because records were both expensive and usually not suitable for a little boy I was forced to absorb it all in that small amount of time I had alone with them in the shop.

Compulsive Hoarding of Great Design

I’m a firm believer that if I had access to all those album covers and posters whenever I wanted I could have been a much better artist earlier on. When I decided I wanted go to school to become a graphic designer one of the first things I was taught was to start collecting different types of magazine ads that you enjoy, to me that just confirms my belief.

The idea of collecting reference materials was basically a tip from the teacher and wasn’t given any more attention through the rest of the course but I heard it loud and clear “start hording images”…lol.

Cutting out ads and images didn’t last long because it was too sloppy and storage was becoming a big problem, how are you supposed to organize all your clippings so you can find what you are looking for?

Digital Deceptions Goes Digital

I ended up scanning them in and organizing them in folders. I quickly knew I needed to come up with some sort of system to classify these images so they can easily be found and what I did was pretty simple.

Say I have a picture of a palm tree it would be put in the folder called “nature” which had a folder called “trees” which contains a folder called “tropical”, simple enough and very effective. Nowadays you can get loads of software for this type of thing which is a very good idea to do if you haven’t already got a load of reference materials and a system.

I also do the same thing with my own photos, websites and even colour pallets, if I see something that I like I take a screen capture and save it to the appropriate folder which I also have a similar system for. I classify sites by style so it would go something like this grunge, corporate, themed and so on you get the idea its whatever works for you.

This is a great practice for designers because websites never last forever plus you save loads of time from surfing garbage and distractions. It is great to be Independent and have a copy of great ads, images and marketing campaigns, you never need the net to reference your archive, isn’t that what freelancing is all about? Most importantly I think it means you are always on the lookout.

Here are a couple of Pablo Picasso quotes about copying and taken at face value he sounds like a thief but what he is really talking about is using reference materials for inspiration but he had a real sense of humour about it.

• “Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.”
• “To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.”

Just remember that they are only reference materials, don’t copy others work and give credit where credit is due.