by Cassandra Rippberger of Pixie Chicago

I often get emails from people asking where I get my inspiration.  Many designers have so many unique answers to this question; while working at my old Advertising agency I loved watching other designers’ processes, just to see how different all of our minds work.  We would each get the same project but have so many diverse design ideas and all of our final products look so different
but all expressed the same idea.
So this month, I am opening my design world to everyone, to see just how “my brain” works. I thought the best way to approach this is to use an example of a job request I have had in the past, to design baby shower invitations. The women throwing the party had an idea of what nursery style the mother-to-be was looking into and sent me the images for inspiration.

Since she wasn’t sure which nursery they were moving forward with I decided to combine them both into the design.  I was drawn to the stripes from the 1st nursery and decided to recreate them.

I loved the sailboats from the 2nd nursery so I drew a simple sailboat.  I then applied the stripe design within the boat and added some color to make it look more accurate.

To get more sailboats, I simply took the first one I created, warped the shape so it was different than the 1st and added complementary coloring to get two more sailboats.

Once I had these design elements the rest just fell together to create a wonderful baby shower invitation, thank you card and matching address label.

The women were thrilled how it all came out and even came back to ask me to do party favors/decorations and the cake design!

Along with images people send me, I get ideas from all around me. Paintings on my walls, books on my shelves, or just a simple color can arouse so many ideas. When looking for your own inspiration my advice would be to STOP. Go throughout your day normally, and because the job is on your mind I am certain something you see will spark an idea. Sometimes we search too hard for things that are right infront of us.