I love great design, and an integral element is great art. I strongly recommend cultivating an eye and appreciation for visually striking illustration and photography. Look beyond the obvious and mundane. Break the “grip and grin” mentality that drags down so many newsletters. The stock shots that make your brochures deadly dull. The generic website photos that fail to distinguish you from anyone else. Shake it up.
In addition to the innumerable writing, marketing, business and news sites I prowl every day, I make sure I get a healthy dose of art in my browsing diet. It truly inspires. In my next life I’m coming back as an illustrator (if I can just overcome that “inability to draw worth a damn” thing).
One of my favorite sites toward that end is Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog. Spend some time there and you’ll see some amazing artists at work in a variety of media. If your own creativity and brainstorming require outside stimuli (and whose doesn’t), this will seem like plugging into a solar flare. Don’t forget your shades.
In the meantime, here’s a little taste from the site courtesy of Chris Ware.
Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.
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