Matias Corea, co-founder of Behance, describes the typical search for inspiration for any graphic designer, and many of us in any field these days.

Google.

When hundreds or thousands of examples of projects similar to our next brief or a click away, why go anywhere else?

But Corea has a different approach:

For website design, I don’t look at other websites. That’s a terrible thing. That’s why we’re making the same website over and over and over. In 2007, when designing Behance, there was nothing else like it on the Internet. I had to make it up, so I used my common sense based on all of my previous experience. We made a lot of mistakes, but slowly we polished it. Designers need to trust their potential to create more. Having so much information available is not good. #

When a designer has brought from fresh inspiration to the table – such as the organic shapes Joshua Davis finds in his garden – you can see the difference. Rather than copying all the trends found online, they’ve found new ideas on land to inform their work (something for the rest of us to mimic from our Google searches 😉).

Where do you go for inspiration?

—
Thanks to this conversation between Courtney Martin and Patrick Palmer for the “online vs on land” metaphor that I’ve been chewing on lately.