Let’s face it—creative block is unavoidable. The real key is learning how to move forward from it. In a new Dribbble video, five of your favorite designers share how they fuel their inspiration and how they deal with feeling creatively stuck.
Luisa Mancera
I’m generally a super curious person. I love reading, I listen to a lot of podcasts, I talk to people. I don’t know—there are just these little sparks every day that I guess I think of less as inspiration and more just like, that’s the meat of life. That’s what keeps things interesting. So I think I seek out that kind of connection or kind of new ideas on a consistent basis.
I even find it useful sometimes, to feel completely uninspired. I need to give myself that time to just get a little low and almost like, just rest. I think to do creative work, you need to have some level of sensitivity and with that sensitivity comes you feeling like—the good and the bad (I would hope). Because if you’re not feeling the bad, you’re probably not feeling that good either.
Jerrod Maruyama
For me, to sort of reawaken the creativity I like to just go back to why I originally started drawing. Whether that’s drawing something specifically for someone, or drawing the things that I used to draw or drawing a favorite character. That usually helps me get out of any kind of rut that I might be in. There’s nothing worse than work that is sort of uninspired and I think our job as creatives, as professional creatives, is to constantly find a way to make even the most boring, mundane jobs interesting.
Jenny Johannesson
My biggest inspiration is the people around me, but not necessarily the people in the same physical space. A lot is online. There’s a lot of really great micro-communities growing on Slack, and we share a lot of things privately which I think is super cool.
Paul Antonson
I’m a huge sketchbook fan. The ideas always come out differently when you start sketching them loosely. You might have an entire way of thinking you’re going to approach something, but as soon as you start thumbnailing or just sketching it out, all the potentials winnow down to what the right solution is. It’s just a matter of kind of switching up so radically—paper versus digital that will often just set you through a problem.
Maya Ealey
One of the best things I think is just talking to creatives. Whether you’re talking to them online through Dribbble or through Slack or any kind of the various ways that we communicate with people. Just talking and chatting with them, and seeing who they’re inspired by, who they admire, and who they look to for inspiration, gives me more diversity and all of the things that I like.
Luisa Mancera
I think to stay inspired you need to also just stay open to whatever is and whatever is here. Practice being really honest with yourself and practice being really honest about your life, and the way that you’re living it, and what you’re doing, and how you live in relationship with other people. It helps those roadblocks to just not exist in the first place or to clear them if they’re already there.
Find more Inspiration stories on our blog Courtside. Have a suggestion? Contact stories@dribbble.com.
