Inspiration is fantastic when it strikes, but what do you do when you have deadlines and can't wait around for it to magically appear?
Building systems can help you overcome these blocks and save huge amounts of time in your design work. In a previous post, I wrote about the systems I use in my own Inspiration Library, but in this series, I'm diving into how I find inspiration for specific design elements: Color, Texture, Light, and Text.
Texture: the details are everything
Texture plays a huge role in art and architecture - it helps us imagine what materials and techniques were used, even if we aren't up close.
Whenever I'm wandering in a new city,
I always find myself drawn to architectural details and I often notice textures and materials before I pay attention to colors and shapes!
In digital design, texture is even more important - it brings movement to patterns, shows the motion of your hand across the page, leads the eye from one element to the next... and can be used to imitate hand-made processes like linocut, block printing, painting, watercolor...
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While the examples above are an example of a really bold use of texture, there are many other ways to play with texture in your work: in this example, I used a really soft, "smoky" texture at a low contrast to bring more attention to the rabbits and the text.
Below, I've used textures to create shading and suggest certain materials- you'll see that I've left the plant leaves without a texture, so that they become a bit more bold and illustrative compared to the other elements in the scene:
Now it's your turn: start photographing textures around you, and collect them in an album.
When you're sketching or creating finished pieces of art, see how you can recreate these textures by hand-drawing, using new materials, or even digitizing your photos and dropping them straight into your designs- there's so much you can do!
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