Aspiration

I sometimes talk with my students about differentiating between inspiration and aspiration when looking at other design work. It’s quite easy to find examples of interface and digital design work on the web, and as a designer to go through a small emotional journey including a mix of desire, jealousy, frustration.

I think as designers, we definitely should be looking at others' work to help us see better and push ourselves to do better work. However, I think a lot of the resources out there are meant to inspire us. Designers share work in progress, concepts, and even mockups of things they’ve done for fun or to get noticed as designers. Natural, of course. And the goal is typically to show off a bit. These kind of design samples can be great to look at for ideas and inspiration, but doing so should come with a caveat: We’re often looking at things that have never made it through a production process and into the hands of real people. There’s a big difference between looking at design work in this sense, and in looking at the results of design work in the wild.

If we look around out concepts and mockups for inspiration, I think we should also be looking around at launched products for aspiration.

So I’m starting this page to share resources for aspirational purposes. I hope this will grow over time, but I think it’s better to get something out the door than try to make it perfect and have it never see the light of day.

Examples