This is exactly how I felt over the last few days… Even though it was me telling me to get back in the cubicle!!!

I’m sure I’m not alone in sometimes experiencing a lack of inspiration or creativity… For example, the past few weeks I’ve been working on mainly technical projects, no design work so to speak. It’s been site transfers, and theme creation from existing designs, but no actual ‘sit down and design’ tasks. In other words, my routine had become technically based and no creativity was required!!!

However, my current project IS a design-from-scratch one. I started working on it, scrapped the first attempt for being, well basically, BLAH. Sent out second attempt as a draft design, but spent all last night tossing and turning as in hindsight it too was BLAH (you all know what I mean when I say this I’m sure). So this morning, after moaning on MSN to a friend about my lack of creative juice, I dug deep, and found myself piecing together, what I personally think, is a beautiful site design. Whether the client goes for it or not is completely up to them, but I like it and I’m happy that it’s of a higher calibre than what I sent to them yesterday (and I’ve told them so in my recent email to them)!

I reckon, in order to help prevent such stagnation from occurring again, I’m going to have to create a ‘mood’ book for myself. Whereby I print off (cause I like to have such things in printed form) imagery, designs I like and find myself drawn to, font samples, etc, to have something to flick through when I do find myself struggling to get a design just right..

It also got me wondering, what do others do when such things happen? I know the age old ‘take a break’ but what do you do when your break has taken you away from designing too long, and you struggle to get that side of the brain creating again?

I really would love to hear what you do!