- If you're a designer, and you're looking for inspiration,
and not finding it, it can be really frustrating.
So in this video, I wanna share with you kind of four tips,
and these are much more than just tips.
They're things to remember
when you are in the process of looking for inspiration
at the beginning of any kind of design project,
and it doesn't matter what discipline you're from.
My name is Morna if we have never met before.
I'm an industrial designer who designs physical product.
So all the examples are gonna be those,
but this runs true for any design discipline.
Also, at the end of this video,
I am gonna be talking about the difference
between copying a design and stealing different aspects,
and I'm gonna be showing you examples
of some of my favorite designs that have been copied,
and some example of my own work of how I steal aspects.
So, let's get into it.
(bass thumping beat)
So, the first thing to remember
is that inspiration is everywhere in the world.
I start with this belief
because I think that whatever we believe,
our mind tends to find evidence of it in the world.
And so, this is something that I,
it's a good belief to have.
It's something that I want my mind to do.
I want my mind to find inspiration everywhere in the world.
So, that is sort of just my starting point.
And if inspiration is like everywhere in the world,
then we could also say that each thing we look at
is like a concentration of potential for inspiration.
So let's just look
at this Seagate hard drive for a minute
because there's many ways we could be inspired
just by looking at it.
Now the first thing that I see
and you probably see it too,
especially 'cause I'm moving it around
is this kind of, is this surface texture,
and how it kind of like shimmers in the light.
So that immediately is something
that we could be inspired by.
The surface texture actually reminds me
of like a hammered metal finish,
except that it's more, this is more geometric
as opposed to like traditional kind
of hammered metal finish.
It's more kind of organic-looking,
so you could be inspired,
and go on a whole path of inspiration
just looking at surface texture,
and how that really makes a rectilinear box
appear much more interesting.
You could be inspired by the color.
This kind of gray metallic color
and how it not only speaks like metallic,
the language of metallic,
but also the combination with this surface texture.
Like I said before, it reminds me
of the hammered metal finish
so these two things combined,
make it reminiscent of metal.
You could be inspired by the graphic identity,
which is just printed on the surface of this plastic part.
You could be inspired by details
such as the LED right here,
how it's the the form of the LED,
the fact that it's not super visible,
like it doesn't, you know, when the LED is not on,
it kind of recedes into the background, you hardly see it.
You could be inspired by that idea.
You could also be inspired by the size.
You know, this size reminds me
of maybe just a little bit larger
than like a man's wallet.
And so, there might be something about that size
that relates to whatever you're working on.
The other thing is this back surface texture.
You could be inspired by the idea of like a glossier finish.
It's not super glossy and a more matte finish.
And those are finishes in the tool in them,
sorry, in the mold that made this plastic part.
It would be a specific.
You would choose the mold finish here,
and the mold finish here,
and that's how that is done.
You could also be inspired just by the form.
You know, a simple rectilinear form.
That is, when you're thinking about
how someone uses this on their desk,
it's just like a book.
Speaking of form, I have to show you guys something
because while I was looking at this form,
I came across another portable hard drive
that has a similar idea in it.
When we're talking about the form,
one thing that is present in this form
is we can see that the front part is a silver color,
the back part is a black color,
and the result of that combination is that overall,
it makes the form feel smaller.
You can imagine if the two parts were similar color,
if this thing was like all black or all silver,
it would feel much thicker.
Okay, so that's an idea.
Now, look at this hard drive.
This WD hard drive, check this out.
Notice how they've split the form in half.
It runs, you can see it on all sides,
and it has no functional purpose.
There's no reason to have this
kind of indentation in the form,
except that it breaks up the form.
It makes the form feel smaller.
And you can see the top half,
this very high gloss finish.
The bottom half is this like textured,
is a more matte textured finish.
So I thought that was really interesting when I found it
because here you have
two hard drives that have kind of the same idea,
and you can see how when we're talking about inspiration,
how when you look at one thing,
and you start to kind of go in there,
and ask questions about, "Well, why is it like that?"
Or, "What is the result of something being the way it is?"
You can see that like other things address those same issues
or can be kind of inspired in the same way.
Now, I wanted to share that with you
because I think it's really easy to get into a routine
where you're only looking at,
you're looking at the same things,
and you're looking at them in the same way.
So I think in this type of video,
maybe a lot of people wanna just know like,
"Where is the cool website that I need to go to?"
Or, "Where's the cool place that I should go check out?"
And well, that can be valuable.
I think a better way to think about inspiration
is that it's not necessarily about where you look,
it's about how you look.
Have you guys ever been in a situation
where you've seen two people take inspiration
from the exact same thing
and the result is completely different?
So, you could argue that those two people
are different people.
They interpret things differently.
They have different creative styles, whatever,
but there's also the possibility
that they've looked at that thing in different ways,
different perspectives, different points of view,
and that is kind of at the heart of the concept
that I'm talking about.
And this leads us to the concept,
how you look at something will determine what you see.
Now, you may have noticed that as we're talking
about all the different types of inspiration
that we could find in this one thing,
now depending on what we're looking at,
what we're like focusing our attention on,
really determines the type of inspiration that we can find.
If you are looking for something specific,
you will see that in other things, okay.
For example, whenever I am doing form development,
I go through a phase
where I look at things online,
and around me,
and I feel like I just put a filter over my eyes,
and everything that I look at, I just see its form, okay.
And what I'm doing is I'm trying to get ideas
about form for my project.
When I do this form,
looking for inspiration for form development,
and look at everything.
Like, I look, and literally like, I look at everything.
Is this an appropriate form for my design project?
Yes or no?
No, okay.
Is this an appropriate form?
Would it work?
What if you turned it, oh crap, okay, upside down?
Would that work?
What would it look like?
I imagined it in my head
and I'm like, "Oh, that's a pretty good idea."
And then, I'll save the image, okay.
So if we know that how you look at something
will determine what you see,
the question then is like, "How is that gonna help us
"when we go to do our inspirational research?"
And this kind of leads into my third tip.
If you are a professional designer,
if you are a student of design,
you probably know or should know
that everything that we design has common ingredients in it.
So for example, in all products,
all products have things like form, function,
material, manufacturing process, et cetera.
The list goes on.
If you are interested in learning more
about the ingredients, specifically of product design,
I do have a free workbook,
and I'll just put a link up above.
And these ingredients are design discipline-specific,
meaning that, you know, the ingredients in architecture,
like all buildings have certain ingredients,
common ingredients.
All graphic design has common ingredients.
All fashion design is common ingredients,
just like all product design has common ingredients.
When you know what you're looking for,
it brings a clarity,
a purpose to your inspiration research.
You are directed.
I think what can happen
when people are looking at it for inspiration,
is they'll find an idea, one idea about form,
and then they're looking, they find an idea about material,
and then they find an idea about surface texture,
and then they find an idea about color,
and it's just this very random activity.
And this leads into the fourth tip
which is structure your search.
So typically, when I'm searching for things,
I'll spend a given amount of time.
Let's just say, I'm gonna spend an hour
only looking at form.
That's all I do for an hour, is just go through,
and look at different forms,
and evaluate whether or not
they're appropriate for my design.
And the nice thing about structuring your search,
it actually kind of expands how you think about things
because all of a sudden,
you're having to just look at one thing,
and you might not have ever considered
how something could be useful
because maybe if you just do research kind of haphazardly,
and kind of all over the place,
you may be missing a lot of potential ideas,
and/or ways of thinking about something
in a new and different way.
So we can't really have a conversation about inspiration
without talking about the difference
between copying something
versus what I would say,
stealing different aspects of something.
So let's talk about that for a minute.
I'd like to give you just an example of each
so we're on the same page.
One of my favorite examples of copying
are the cars in China.
So, I'm just gonna put some examples of these cars.
And they're pretty crazy.
Like, just how similar these cars are
to the original brand.
I think a good way to define copying
is when you look at the two things side by side
and struggle to see the differences between them
versus when I say stealing aspects of something.
I'd like to show you an example
of something that I worked on.
It's called Nio.
It's like a security tag,
similar if you've heard of the product called Tile.
It works in a similar way.
Unfortunately, it came to market,
and then it's kind of a long story,
but it's too bad because Apple was interested
in carrying it in the Apple store,
and so it's too bad that things didn't work out.
So anyways, back to this product.
So with this product,
like all of the internals, the PCB board,
and the electronics were all set.
So, in terms of an overall form factor,
it was really, there wasn't a lot of leeway.
It was going to be some kind of rectilinear box.
I actually just found these really early concepts
of three different ways
that this rectilinear box could appear.
And one of the things that was up for grabs
that we did have control over
was the placement of the LED.
That is where I stole two different ideas.
So the first idea was actually stolen off
of Cindy Crawford's face.
If I put the product and Cindy Crawford's face up onscreen,
can you guess what it is?
I should just back up a minute.
There were a few ideas that were swirling in my mind
about how I wanted the product to appear.
I wanted it to be like a character
in the sense that you would
always wanna carry this little character with you,
but I didn't want it to be complete,
like very obviously anthropomorphic,
so I didn't want it to look like, you know,
little eyes, and a mouth, or something,
and look really like too many human traits,
just let it be more subtle.
So I thought of the front of the product
as the kind of face.
And so, the part that I stole was, you know,
I started thinking about Cindy Crawford's mole,
and how, you know, she became really well known
for this like little kind of iconic thing on the side
of just above her mouth.
For the second idea,
I stole one aspect from our client's previous product,
and I'm gonna show this right on the screen right now.
Take a guess.
What do you think that idea was?
If you're thinking it has something to do
with the shape, like the outer shape of the product,
it's very similar, as you can see, to the LEDs.
So, I thought it might be neat
to have this kind of like, oh, even though,
we weren't taking any of that form factor
into the new product and for good reason,
just to have this like little bit of almost legacy
of what the previous iteration of this product had been.
So to bring a little bit of that history
into the the new product in a way
that most people would never know about.
So as you can see, on the final product,
it's placed on, in this case on the left side,
and then there's a smaller, there's one size LED,
and then there's a smaller LED reminiscent
of the old product.
So, those are the two aspects that I stole.
To be honest, this video was challenging.
I've reshot this video so many times,
trying to figure out the best way of presenting it.
So I'm really curious to know,
like if you got any use out of it,
but also like, you know, maybe you have different ways
of getting inspiration,
and they're different from mine,
and let me know what those are.
So, I'll see you next time.