While I may not have had the time to post to my blog lately ( the weather has been super lovely), I have been doing a much better job of keeping a collection of what inspires me.
Last month Viget’s Design Director, Tom gave a fantastic presentation to our design team on various applications for collecting inspiration (he wrote a marvelous post). This presentation finally kicked my ass into gear on creating a collection of my own. While Evernote was a tempting possibility I joined Elliot Jay Stocks and Patrick Haney who have been using LittleSnapper to keep a visual record of design that inspire them. With some tips from Tom (@TheTroz) and a fellow Viget designer, Talbs (@talbs) I was quickly on my way to a solid little collection.
There are two factors that make LittleSnapper the solution for me:
It seamlessly integrates into my work flow.
I have the icon in my dock, when I see something I snap it. It provides fields for all the information that makes that “snap” useful to me. There is a field for the web address, description, and descriptive tags. I hardly have to go out of my way to document a really cool piece of design. My only suggestion for improvement here would be a tag suggestion feature… its hard to remember if I am using the tag “Packaging” vs “Package Design” when I am in a hurry.
It has an online gallery component that creates an RSS feed.
While I could set little snapper up to integrate with my Flickr account, personally I want to keep my Flickr for photos and personal design pieces, and have a separate area just for inspirational work of other designers. Having it online is essential for me because I may want to pull it up in a pinch to show clients or students and I would also like to share it with you guys. The fact that an RSS feed is generated adds a whole other component to it that I would like to play with further. Eventually I would like to pull the RSS feed to my blog to display selected pieces of inspiration.
Two Things I have learned from Creating a Quick Snapper Gallery
Holy Crap, I have a very defined “taste” in design! Yeah, you guys probably know that all ready, but its interesting to see it for myself.
Most of what inspires my online design comes from offline inspiration. Package and poster design is incredibly beautiful.
Check out LittleSnapper and subscribe to my new “Design Inspiration” feed. Or…if you would rather… just mosey on over to my QuickSnapper page.
7 Comments
What a great idea! It never even occured to me to use LittleSnapper like this.
— June 5, 2009
I recently started using LS as well, but I’m still working out the kinks in my workflow. My first requirement was that my collections be available on any computer I’m working on. I set up a QuickSnapper account, but found it to be a little too unreliable, and I didn’t want to have to remember to publish everything. Then I discovered that putting the LittleSnapper library on DropBox allows me to share it between multiple computers! Awesomeness. Right now I’m using LS for websites and design elements, and a DropBox photos folder in the Dock to drag single inspiring images into, which I learned from Jon Hicks.
There are still some things I would like to see. Tag autocompletion would be great. Automatically uploading snaps, too. But it’s a lot better than cmd + shift + caps lock + 4 for everything!
— June 5, 2009
I’ve gotta say i completely agree. Little Snapper has been a paradigm shift in my work methods. Taking a snap of a complete website and categorizing is as easy as it always should have been. I tinkered with it for about 10 min before I decided to purchase.
Great tip.
— June 5, 2009
I have been using LittleSnapper for about 3 months now and can’t imagine going back to the old way of cataloging inspiration. I never thought of bringing the feed into my site though… good idea!
— June 5, 2009
Cool treats, thanks for sharing.
— June 11, 2009
Can’t wait to try this out. Does anyone know how you might go about integrating feed thumbnails into your blog?
— June 16, 2009
I’m checking this out for my job, but I’m not quite sure I understand the value here. How much different is this than just viewing items with Adobe Bridge? It is just that the tagging process is slightly easier? Does anyone know what the differences are between the free and paid versions?
— October 28, 2009