You get a new briefing from your client, and the gears start turning right away:
I saw this the other day at the supermarket. On my way to work I noticed X. I got this thing in the mail last week.
None of the references I saved on Instagram, Pinterest, or Are.na in the last couple of days come to mind in that moment.
Every day I spend more time than I would like mindlessly scrolling other people's projects on these platforms for inspiration (and you probably do as well). In a matter of minutes I go through hundreds if not thousands of projects, looking at them for a split second even if they catch my attention. Here is where physical media truly shows how much "stickier" it is.
One of my go-tos for type reference is Type: History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles, and the reality is that I have access to everything in this book online. Not only that, it's also faster to search up "typeface inspiration" or something similar rather than going to the bookshelf, finding the book, taking it to my desk and finding space to place it (especially hard with this one since it's a big book) and flipping through the pages. But the reality is that all these layers of friction make the experience way more memorable, it sticks in your mind.
There are magazines I flipped through over ten years ago whose layouts I could still draw from memory, but I couldn't tell you what I saved on Instagram this morning.
If I was reading this instead of writing it, we just reached the part where I would go "yeah, no shit," because anyone who has done any sort of creative work knows that any sort of design product sticks better with an experience attached to it. So what can we do as creatives? We can start building our own physical reference collections.
The most obvious examples are design books. Someone already went through the trouble of compiling everything for you, and they tend to be great starting points when you're unsure of where to go with a project.
But the real stuff comes from what you curate yourself:
Magazines, from the weekly supermarket "what's on promotion" flyer to a niche zine in a language I can't even read.
Leaflets picked up at cultural or promotional events.
Business cards.
Sketches/Photos you take of work you see around. Small stuff is easy to grab, but there's no easy way to acquire and save posters or other big formats.
And once you're collecting all this, it's about saving it. Personally, I don't organize it much. I find myself more willing to grab something that's in reach, so I tend to move stuff around so that the references change. Other creatives I know like to organize by color, some like to organize by theme, or even display part of their collection and swap it out every few days, so that the design they're consuming daily keeps changing.
All this to say: we all have access to the same stuff online. If every creative is pulling from the same references and the same inspiration, every creative starts making the same thing. The way to fight that is by curating your own stuff, and the easiest, most rewarding way I've found to do it is this one.
Think of it like a playlist you get to keep building your whole life, instead of just listening to the radio.
Every playlist starts with one song. Every reference collection starts with one torn page. Go find yours.