Let’s talk about inspiration now, because I don’t think it means what most people think it means.

There is such a thing as surface-level “how”/”hands” inspiration, certainly. That’s the kind you can look for. You see something beautiful, clever, or interesting, and you mentally bookmark it to use in your work later. This — and pretty much only this — you can get from Dribbble. It’s not useless, but it’s definitely not the whole story.

We forget that inspiration originally meant “to breathe”. It’s not always a conscious process, nor is it selective. Your brain is constantly collecting and cross-referencing all the information poured into it. Eventually it can be exhaled again into your work as a metaphor. All the seemingly unrelated stimulus your brain chews on during the day is grist for a creative mill. The more you’ve seen, the more ability your brain has to pattern match and look at problems in new ways.

One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon is in a video of Neven Mrgan designing a hiking trail app as an exercise. Neven’s an avid chef, so of course he comes up with the idea of using recipes as a metaphor for communicating trail directions. It’s a great approach that informs the design of the solution before the hands-work ever begins.

I’ve seen this kind of associative-metaphor design process in so many ways from so many great designers. I worked with a motion designer who constantly referenced old sci-fi movies and retro arcade games in the way things looked and moved. He would pull up YouTube to show me what he was talking about, and in the course of a six second clip I would suddenly understand with perfect clarity the details of his design. Other people I’ve worked with have used metaphors from aviation, comic books, and architecture.

Design is like language — a larger vocabulary of concepts gives you more and better ways to be understood.