The Unbranded Me: Chapter Five
I’ve always struggled with the idea of “looking for inspiration”. The phrase alone makes it feel forced. Like something you can summon on demand if you just scroll long enough or stare hard enough at the right book.
That’s never been how it’s worked for me.
I am always looking. Constantly. I can’t really switch it off. But for a long time, I didn’t realise that looking and noticing are two very different things. I was collecting things without consciously acknowledging that I was collecting them at all.
College was the first time I experienced this contradiction. We were given months to work on final projects. Endless time. No pressure. No urgency. In theory, the perfect conditions for creativity. In reality, it was paralysing. Too much space to overthink. Too much time to doubt. We were never taught what to do when the clock wasn’t ticking, or how to trust our instincts when nothing was forcing a decision.
Then came agency life, and everything swung hard in the opposite direction.
At one agency, we were encouraged to sit in the library before starting a project. Shelves of beautifully curated design books. The idea was noble. Slow down. Absorb. Be inspired. The problem was that books have never really been my thing. I don’t come alive flipping through pages looking at other people’s work. It felt like inspiration by instruction. Well-intentioned, but disconnected from how my brain actually works.
After that came the design factory. No time to think. No space to pause. Just get it done and move on to the next thing. Ideas had to arrive immediately, or not at all. Looking back, it’s no surprise that creativity started to feel transactional. Efficient, yes. Inspired, not always.
And yet, even then, I was still collecting.
Because being a designer means you never really stop seeing. I analyse everything that’s been touched by a human hand. Fonts on shop windows. Kerning on menus. Line breaks on posters. Colour combinations that shouldn’t work but somehow do. Widows and orphans that make my eye twitch in a way only another designer would understand. I don’t always say it out loud, but I see it. I always have. Sometimes I’ve said something and been laughed at, because unless you’re a designer, you don’t notice these things. But they lodge themselves quietly in my memory all the same.
That’s why OFFF in Barcelona hit differently.
Not because it was loud or impressive, but because it reminded me how alive inspiration can feel when you lift your head up. Walking the city. Watching how people move through space. Seeing type painted directly onto walls. Feeling how light shifts colour throughout the day. One artist talked about filling sketchbooks simply by walking. No agenda. No outcome. Just attention. It wasn’t a revelation. It was a moment of recognition. This is how it’s always worked for me. I’d just forgotten to name it.
Travel has always done this to me too. Snowboarding without thinking about design. Riding, hiking, wandering cities with a camera. At the time, it felt like escape. Looking back, it was education. I was absorbing rhythm, composition, contrast, scale, flow. Not consciously. Just by being present.
The internet doesn’t give you that. Algorithms are designed to give you more of what you already like. Familiarity disguised as discovery. Which is fine if you want convenience, but dangerous if you want originality. If you’re always being shown the same references, the same styles, the same thinking, you’re not really being inspired. You’re being reinforced.
That doesn’t make digital tools useless. They’re helpful refinements. But they’re a terrible starting point.
Working for myself finally gave me something I didn’t have before. Choice. Not unlimited time, but permission to pause. To leave something unfinished. To come back later. To trust that an idea might arrive while I’m doing something else entirely. And more often than not, it does.
Some of my best thinking now happens when I’m not trying to think at all. On a run. On a ride. Halfway through a walk when something I saw days ago suddenly connects to a problem I thought I’d already solved. That’s not inefficiency. That’s how my brain works when it’s allowed to.
The realisation for me has been this. Inspiration has never been missing. It’s been everywhere. In cities, in mountains, in badly kerned menus and beautifully painted signs. I was always collecting it. I just didn’t recognise it because I thought inspiration had to look louder, clearer or more intentional than it really is.
They say love finds you when you stop looking.
I think inspiration works the same way.
When you stop chasing it, it has space to catch up.
And once you understand that, the world becomes a much richer place to work from.