How to expand your creativity by finding inspiration in the everyday
Written by Craig Berry, Designer at Studio Nomad and Writer
Published 14th June 2022
From classical music to contemporary dance, 90’s arthouse films to runway fashion shows and East London graffiti to West London high-rises; creativity is all around us, even if you’re not looking for it. Wandering around a city is the best place to experience this, and it’s different for everyone, that’s the beauty of it.
© Craig Berry - MF Doom
I grew up in Wirral in the North-West of England, attended Art college in Liverpool, moved to Leeds to study Graphic Design, and flew to Amsterdam for my first real job. I stuck around for five years and recently packed it all in to move to London to get married and start the latest chapter in my life. Seemingly, I’ve always been drawn to living and being in a city.
When I moved to Amsterdam, I didn’t really have my own taste in anything, from music, to fashion, to design. But being dropped into this new city gave me space to develop my tastes by meeting new people, talking about new things, getting lost and finding cool stuff. Every day was a day of random discovery, and for most of the time as a graphic designer living in Amsterdam – my inspiration didn’t even come from graphic design.
© Craig Berry - Rotterdam Library
Often, you might find inspiration in discovering new art, yet find yourself not able to apply this to your work or what you do on a day-to-day basis. But it’s about discovering something that sticks with you by having an open mind, especially as a budding creative, and to be like a sponge and soak it all up.
Now in London, I’m continually exploring new places and seeing new things every day. From my daily commute, or on the weekends cycling to new parts of London. It feels like I can never run out of things to see. Samuel Johnson said it best when he said: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”.
Creative cities, creative energies, and how it affects you artistically
Having lived in Amsterdam and London, it’s easy to compare them as multicultural cities bursting with artistic energy. They both have incredible creative landscapes and a vibrant youth scene. Because Amsterdam is smaller in scale in comparison to London, it has a more concentrated creative scene. At times it feels like people are running out of space to express themselves and it’s bursting out into the suburbs. London isn’t like that… yet.
© Craig Berry - Design District
Travelling to new cities or even new places in your current city or hometown lets you tap into the unique vibe and culture of that specific place. Even if you’re only there for a short time you should allow yourself to experience new things, see new buildings, new street art, new shops, restaurants and everything else. Although these encounters may be new for you, these spots and places have been there for a long time waiting for you to find them.
Find out more
Living and working full-time as a designer, I’m constantly trying to discover new ways to inspire my own creativity. I love to adopt the method and mantra of “find out more”.
A great example of this is with music. When you listen to the radio and hear a song by a new artist, encourage yourself to find out more. Check out their page on Spotify, find more of their music, look for that artist in a record shop and scan their record label peers. Then find out more about that label, its sub-genres, who runs it, where it’s based and then take a left turn on that journey. Allowing yourself to fall into that rabbit hole and staying stuck in that maze of exploration can lead you to hidden places that could inspire new work and thinking.
© Craig Berry - Acid House
At university, we were given a list of books to read and were recommended to visit the local library in search of new literature, for a few thoughtful reasons. Firstly, no normal university student on a shoestring budget can purchase a whole list of books. Second, what’s missing from the online experience of purchasing a book is not being exposed to the library shelf experience, where you find your book but you also get to see what’s next to it, and what’s next to that.
Before you know it, you could be traversing different and fascinating worlds from graphic design, to gardening, to garage rock.
Go beyond immediate and obvious interests
When you open your eyes and mind beyond your immediate interests that’s when things begin to get really exciting.
As a designer at Nomad, I’ve come to realise that to only look at existing graphic design for creative inspiration would be incredibly dull. I love what I do, but nobody wants to spend every minute of life looking at what they do day in and day out. Our world: the world of design and creativity, is so much richer than that. If every graphic designer only looked at graphic design for inspiration, everything would look the same.
Keep a visual mood board in your phone (and in your head). It’s something that comes in handy when working on a project. I often pull up a photographer I’ve seen in an exhibition, a typeface I saw on a shop sign or a colour palette from a restaurant menu. These are the sort of things you can’t fake or find from a Pinterest search. Working in the studio alongside fellow designers, we’re able to bring these daily references and anecdotes to the creative process. It creates a richer working experience and outcome.
© Craig Berry - Here East
You don’t have to be a musician to be inspired by sound and lyrics. You don’t have to be an architect to love a building and be inspired by materials and forms. You don’t have to be a dancer to be inspired by movement and rhythm. Taking in these small but impactful elements is key. And if you can’t directly apply something you’ve seen to what you do, it doesn’t matter because it’s about having that almost sense of jealousy. That burst of seeing something and thinking “that’s f-ing cool, I want to make something as cool as that” and bringing that ecstatic and inspired attitude to your creative practice and workplace.
Inspiration doesn’t have to be as high-brow as 1950’s mid-century modernist, socialist mass-housing architecture… If you can take inspiration from a packet of crisps in Tesco, more power to you.
About the author
Craig Berry is a full-time graphic designer and part-time writer originally from the North but living in London via Leeds, Liverpool and Amsterdam. As a graphic designer, his work predominantly focuses on branding, logos, typography and graphic systems. As a writer, he looks critically and contextual at all walks of creativity from art to design, fashion, furniture and beyond.
In his short career he has worked at Superunion, Ogilvy Social.Lab and most recently Nomad on clients such as ASICS, Philips, Sky and Heineken as well as having published pieces in FONK Magazine in the Netherlands.
