Where do you get ideas? Where do you find inspiration? Whether you come up with your design ideas by looking at the work of others, studying how other designers approach the design process, or by looking at pictures or the world around you, one of these books is sure to provide just the right type of brainstorming and creativity boost you need.
1. Inspiration=Ideas: A Creativity Sourcebook for Graphic Designers
Some of the world's top designers reveal where and how they find inspiration from people to songs to everyday garbage. The book then offers pages full of patterns, textures, and other images from which the designer can draw inspiration and develop their own creative ideas.
2. Idea Index: Graphic Effects and Typographic Treatments
This pocket-size book serves much like a clip file of ideas helping you to get past a design problem, make changes, and brainstorm new ideas. Not intended as a designer showcase, individual concepts are presented, described briefly, and simply illustrated.3. Layout Index
Just as the Idea Index provides inspiration for graphics and type, the Layout Index helps you discover layout solutions and provides a trigger for your imagination as you design layouts for brochures, Web designs, posters, flyers, advertising, newsletters, and stationery. It's a convenient take anywhere size too.4. Graphic Design: Inspirations & Innovations
Discover how other graphic designers find inspiration and approach the design process while also pleasing the client. Profiles of 75 graphic designers are accompanied by examples of their work, including some sketches and early versions of the designs to see how they move from idea to final printed piece.5. Graphic Design: Inspirations & Innovations 2
This version offers up case studies of "the best of design done under the worst of conditions." Get past impossible deadlines, natural disasters, human error, and "Murphy's Law" and still be creative and deliver the design with these inspiring tales from real designers.6. Creative Sparks
Creativity is the focus and this book delivers it in the form of tips, idea-starters, suggestions, and advice on how to challenge yourself as a designer and still create practical visual communications.7. Visual Workout: Creativity Workbook
Instead of just reading about how other designers approach the design process or browsing design annuals, this book invites you to put pencil to paper and learn how to use sketches, develop an idea file, explore design possibilities, and come up with fresh, innovative concepts and design solutions.8. The Big Book of New Design Ideas
If you find inspiration by browsing books of brochure designs, corporate logos, award-winning package designs, or other such creative annuals, then this book is written for you. It's like a cross-section of all those picture books of graphic design eye candy in one convenient volume.9. Graphic Idea Notebook
A long time favorite of mine, it's just page after page of graphic idea-generators for conveying information visually.It's one of those books you thumb through when you're stuck for ideas on how to make a graph more visually exciting, want to go beyond the default "drop caps" in your software, or need ideas on how to visually convey movement, unity, division, importance, or other concepts.