I like to stay current on design as a whole. Most of the work I do is digital, but I think it’s imperative to stay current on the many facets of design. For one thing, there’s some crazy interesting stuff going on out there, but what’s more is you never know where your next inspiration is going to come from. Take these things for example:

I know I get stuck sometimes thinking, “There’s no way I could redesign this. It’s been designed so many times.” Then I see this. How could you possibly improve on a USB jack? Brilliant! Make them chainable.

Furthermore, how are you going to improve on a plug design? What if the plug folded? It’s the crazy questions like that which lead to great designs such as this folding plug. Yeah, this solution is great design, but what’s even greater is the question that opened the door to the solution. This guy won the Brit Insurance Design of the Year, which to me doesn’t mean as much as the feeling of hand-hitting-forehead which this design brings about.

Finally, sometimes you need to rearrange your thinking. When buying a light fixture, almost always you consider how the light is going to be cast. This bulb design reverses that thinking; think instead of how the shadows are going to be cast.

What if I took that idea to web design. Don’t think about how best to present the content, but instead this about how to present the absence of content. We’ve been told to increase leading to increase legibility. Can we smash everything together to increase legibility? Crazy questions, but they’ve got to be posed to get crazy, head-slapping design.

Thanks to design milk for exposing me to design.

Also on John’s posterous