Design and Inspiration Boards...

As a designer, a place to keep all your sketches, designs, creative ideas and inspiration is an absolute necessity. Whether you have one board for all your ideas or separate boards for every design, space or theme.

There are a variety of great ways to keep your own version of an inspiration board from traditional to modern, including:

1. Digital inspiration boards are my favourite as I do so much on the computer already, so whenever I find designs, brands, colours or anything that catches my eye and inspires me I create a little digital boards like these. My boards can include very specific ideas and designs for upcoming jewellery collections or generic themes like where I want to go in the future, designers and brands I admire for their success or their style, the type of jewellery I would like to create in the future, skills I want to perfect (like drawing) and so much more.

Some of my preferred programs and sites to use for creating your own digital design boards are:

a. PInterest is my favourite and it is in itself one big inspiration board so is the perfect place to start, just make a board and start pinning.

b. Polyvore I started making inspiration boards on Polyvore for clothing sets and fashion ideas but very quickly discovered there is so much more that can be done.

c. Picmonkey or any other photo editing software that has the capacity to create montages or pages.

Digital boards are the perfect way to collate ideas for new collections,
things you want to achieve, designers you admire and so much more.

Over the next 12 months I am trying to revamp my jewellery collections so that I have a more cohesive look to my work and have been creating a range of design boards for each collection of items that can be grouped and these boards will be the starting point for my expansion and redesign of all current jewellery to create collections that flow.

You can see just how flexible and fun creating digital design boards can be, but creating traditional Inspiration boards can be great too.

2. Wall Board, this can be in many forms including some very unusual and visually appealing ideas:

a. Traditional pin board or elastic strung board
 

b. I saw this ingenious idea of using clipboards arrayed on the wall to allow for a variety of themed inspiration boards, perfect for designers that create collections, sets or any multi-design fields. In fact I am thinking about making something like this as the starting point for my new collections, printing out my digital boards, attaching them to a clipboard and start adding, changing and playing with the ideas.  

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c. Using a string line and Peg to clips your images and design sketches like a banner across your wall, very cute.

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3. Books, keeping designs and inspiration in a sketch pad or folder is another great option for a designer allowing your to add colour swatches, images and more to your own handmade sketches and notes. This is the original form that most people kept their mood or design boards in before we went large made our design inspiration part of our décor. This concept is probably the most widely used, even today, I know I sketch all my design ideas in sketch pads and expand on those in my books. 

Do you create mood / inspiration or design boards. Having any ideas you can share, DIY projects you love to create something special. Share it in comments so we can all see what inspires you or visit my PInterest Inspiration Board for ideas on creating your own visual display.