Be comfortable, settle yourself in your favorite spot at home. Rachel’s lesson will be fun and easy. She kicks off with greeting cards. An innovative and creative way to get inspiration. She says, “They are full of just brilliant design ideas,”
“They can pertain to the kind of every occasion under the sun, and come with all kinds of great images and messages, ranging from super funny to really poignant. And you don’t have to go to places like CVS, Walgreens, or the grocery store to browse them.”
Explore company websites, go over their main greeting cards, and look for occasions, events, or holidays. You’ll get excellent inspiration for your fantastic t-shirt slogan. With a few tweaks and clicks, you’ll make sense year-round. You can check out Hallmark, Paper source, American Greetings, Blue Mountain, Greeting Card Universe, 123 Greetings, etc.
“Now, of course, you never wanna directly copy anyone’s image,” Rachel says. “I never recommend doing that. You just kind of want to look at these as a source of inspiration that you could work from.”
Indeed, it would help if you were careful or want to be charged with plagiarism. Rachel also suggests looking around Instagram, which is most people’s aesthetic platform, another excellent source for design ideas. With the expansion of its features, it’s not only limited to photos – there are now videos, reels, memes, and challenges. You should pinpoint accounts with text-based posts to visualize your POD designs.
Search for popular hashtags, such as #CoffeeMugs, #FunnyMemes, #FunnyQuotes, and so on. For sure, they’ll have a pretty good mass impact.
Another thing you can do is to get a grasp of what’s trending on the news and social media. “So if you pay attention to the news, you can find a lot of inspiration for your designs,” Rachel says. “There’s always something interesting going on in the world.
And especially in like politics and entertainment, and they often overlap. You don’t have to stick to traditional news sources either. You can branch out to other sources like Good News Network or Sunny Skyz, or Facebook headlines. Or you can just do a search for positive news, which I tend to find more inspiration from.”
Also, why not see if you can draw inspiration from your old designs? “Take a look through your old design files and see if anything kind of sparks your imagination,” Rachel says. “You might be able to kind of riff off of a design that you made in the past to create something fresh.
Or you could make a tweak or two to an old design to go into a new niche. For example, say you have a design like ‘Pit bulls are my favorite. They make the best pets.’ You could do ‘Guitar players are my favorite. They make the best boyfriends.'”
Browsing in Quora and Reddit is fun. You’ll get many new ideas and knowledge about what’s in or out. Seeking the personal perceptions of family or friends can also generate new ideas. Ask them what they would like to buy or receive.
Ideas are just everywhere, from your favorite song, lyrics, inside jokes, quotes, books, ads, shows – it’s everywhere. You just need to be attentive to what’s going around, open up your vision, and be as creative as possible.
