There is this "you're a designer, how cool is that!" music that I seem to hear every now and then. Now don't get me wrong, design is an incredible profession; this music *is* sweet to me and they are right too: it IS damn cool. Only there are some dark sides you cannot peek into from outside. And one of them is called inspiration. You cannot even talk about inspiration (or lack of it) to the "outside" world without being ridiculous.

What do you do when you have no inspiration? What happens? You cannot work, you feel miserable, you silently despair and fall apart. Seen from the outside you look bored to death, totally lost or inexplicably nervous. You seem absolutely unaware of the existence of notions like deadline, client or P&L sheet at the end of the month. You play Quake, listen to obscure electro-pop, and surf towards the end of the web. What then?

This is the topic on discussion at SpeakUp: "Designers’ Worst Fear" and here is an excerpt:

«Writers get it. Chopping has one. And sometimes you just have to go around it. There is no surprise then that graphic designers are subject to it too: designer’s block.

There it is, facing you in all its brightly empty white glory: Untitled Document. There is no worse situation than not knowing what to do to it. You start putting boxes with pictures, type, colors, you move them around, you scale them, you invert them…nothing. Crap, it looks like crap. Then out of the corner of your eye you catch a glimpse of ol’ faithful: your sketchbook. You pick it up, leaf through some of your past sketches until you reach a brand new, blank page, you energetically write down the project’s name at the top of the page, as if that is what will catalyze your creativity. 30 seconds, then 60, then 5 minutes, then… you scream. “What the hell is wrong?”»

The answers are various: from cooking to cleaning and straightening things up. From walking to watching the plains at the airport. Some talk about watching crap television shows, browsing through magazines or searching for inspiration in other people's work.