Design Inspiration for Summer Projects

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you’ve had another lovely week and a wonderful weekend planned. I’ll be at commencement this weekend as the library’s flag bearer for one of the ceremonies, so we’ll see how that goes. But since we are getting into the weekend and summertime, I wanted to share some design inspiration for summer projects. Summer is a wonderful time to plan and to create with the longer days giving us more daylight for work-playing, so let’s get inspired!

Do you ever worry about not being successful enough, soon enough? If so, you’re not alone. But I hope these two videos help you remember: don’t worry if you’re not a creative success by 30 (see the second part of the video essay here). Go ahead and watch; I’ll wait here. Now that we feel better about how long the journey can be for creative success, let’s use that as inspiration to keep practicing. 🙂

If you need a bit more inspiration to continue working on your creative activities–whatever form they take–check out this great post on how you might be feeling stuck if you are not being used properly. This is so simple and so true and has helped me refocus my energies on things that really do use my talents instead of just doing everything that other people want to drop at my desk.

So now that you are inspired to do some creative work, check out this long, wonderful article full of color inspiration from Smashing Magazine. Summertime feels like a great time to experiment with color (must be all the crazy color combos seen on swim towels and popsicles). What designs can you jazz up in your library with some new color combinations? Maybe those handouts that no one has touched in years? I know I have a list of design projects I want to complete this summer for my library, starting with fixing an advertisement we run in the student newspaper that I’ll be sharing with you soon.

I’ve heard that it is also football season (aka soccer in the USA) so wanted to share this great Soccer (aka football) icon set because we can always use another great icon set to use for designs.

Also, I don’t know about you, but when I’m deep into design work, I often start triple-guessing myself about sentence construction (maybe it’s just me) so I love this tool: FoxType Sentence Tree for sentence diagrams. So cool and works in real time.

I hope you have an inspiring weekend and have some great projects that feed your creative energy. I’ll be back soon with some more news and notes. Allons-y!