Looking to see

Creative notebook

You may find inspiration at any time or place and not just when you are sitting down at work. If you only think about your creative work while you are working on it, then you may find yourself frequently stuck and without fresh ideas.

Always be on the hunt for visual ideas. Take pictures of colors, textures, patterns, and other visual things when you see them. When you see a map that inspires you, take a picture of it and annotate what you like about it. Take a few minutes each day to sketch something that someone else has made. Look for visual analogs - things that are similar to the things that you want to make and that you can use as models for your own work. Collect these visual impressions in a notebook. This can be old-school analog, or digitial, or a hybrid.

Start each entry with the date. For any picture, include at least a brief description of how the visual impression made you feel, what it made you think about, or what you liked about it.

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Map reading

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