I watched a TV documentary the other day about a professional soccer player. As well as his normal soccer training he mixed in training in other sports like boxing and yoga and I thought this sounded a bit odd. Why would somebody that earns his (considerable) daily bread playing soccer spend time learning and training in areas that are not directly related to his profession?
Well, it turns out that they are related in a round-about way. The athlete and his coaches went on to explain that training in other sports and physical activities, as well as regular soccer training keep certain parts of the brain active and stimulated, and this in turn improves soccer performance and prevents the brain and body slowing down.
This soccer player got me thinking about my own profession in design and made me analyse the way I deal with life as a designer. I mostly design for web these days and that can mean anything from interface design, banner advertising, as well as branding and logo design. It’s easy to drift into the same old routine for each project especially when work is coming in thick and fast — and when projects tend to overlap.
It turned out I wasn’t spending enough time “designing” away from a computer screen and out of the office. When I use the word “designing”, I don’t just mean putting together wireframes and pushing pixels in Photoshop — I mean actually gathering creative thoughts, images, videos and other forms of inspiration whilst living life.
As designers, we have an instinctive desire to collect things, from action figures to postcards to t-shirts and posters — it’s just something we do, right? Taking photos, recording videos, bookmarking web pages, ‘like’-ing and ‘favorite’-ing are all forms of collecting and it’s these things that shape us as designers.
Looking for inspiration can also be treated as a form of cross-training. Taking yourself away from your normal (daily) routine is a useful technique. Since my kids arrived a couple of years ago, we’ve found ourselves watching kids TV and movies as well as reading children’s books. Being exposed to these new forms of entertainment meant seeing a whole new world of animation and illustration and it was fun. Treating yourself to a show or a trip to the cinema to see something you wouldn’t normally watch can also be fun.
Read the entire post on Smashing Magazine
The article goes on to discuss learning new skills such as photography, sketching, and so on, and making sure you have the tools to use – a good DSLR camera (not a point-and-shoot or a smartphone job), sketch pads, a camcorder, a smartphone, etc. I would add one more to this – a PayPal account.