From generic to specific, Flickr groups and individual member sets abound in this social media center for images. Flickr isn’t just for your vacation pictures or your latest lolcat photos anymore. Flickr is a great place for loads of inspiration from letterpress to graffiti, typography to doodles. As a graphic designer, I’m always in search of new sources of inspiration for a wide variety of projects. Flickr is the answer!
Bottle caps are simple, sure, but it’s difficult to design for such a small surface area. They can be very inspiring with their use of logos, tiny illustrations and typography.
Business Cards present a similar challenge to the bottle caps–limited space. Both bottle caps and business cards promote the principle of economy; the designer attempts to maximize the effective use of all the elements of design within a small canvas.
Collage Crazy is just one of many collage groups and collections on Flickr. These can provide you with awesome inspiration for your grunge, vintage and hand-made style designs.
Doodle Art is also great for figuring out the details of the hand-drawn style. Doodles are also a great example of the various uses of the element of line.
Typography of the World is your one stop shop for just what it says–typography from around the world. Notice the forms typography in different languages can take. Is there anything you can assimilate into your own typography?
If world typography isn’t quite what you’re looking for, what about experimental typography? There are some pretty cool uses of typography to be found in this collection!
Letterpress is a beautiful art, and you won’t be disappointed with the examples presented in this Flickr collection.
Want some highly specific inspiration? How about Israeli Street Art? It’s so colorful!
What other cool Flickr groups or sets do you return to for inspiration?
Excellent!
Flickr is just faboulus. I have been using the fotodropper plugin for wordpress a lot in the past, from the admin you can easily add creative commons photos into your blog. Plain, simple and great.
For more inspiration check these search groups:
http://www.flickr.com/search/groups/?q=signage
http://www.flickr.com/search/groups/?q=architecture
http://www.flickr.com/search/groups/?q=sunset
The other day I was reading a wine column in a magazine and thought that wine labels are a perfect source of inspiration for typography and imagery, and just like your first two sources – bottle caps and business cards – they provide very little work space. I did manage to find an inspiring collection of wine labels on Flickr.
I love that there’s a Flickr group for doodle art – LOL!
I completely agree that bottle tops are a great source of inspiration, it’s great to see such a good collection here! I can’t say that I use Flickr to draw inspiration, but I’m going to investigate….
Thanks for the tip!
@Vivien Recently I found this out-of-the-box wine label. Plain and simple. And I believe with adding typography to a wine label the companies can increase their sales. Thanks for sharing the flickr wine group.
Nice collection, Flickr really is a great place for inspiration and creativeness & some sets you’ve picked out. Thanks.
Fubiz,
Glad you enjoyed!
Sander,
I’ll have to check out that plugin, too. Ha, that wine label tear off is really cool!
Nice! Thanks for adding more inspiring Flickr groups
Vivien,
I love walking down the wine aisle at the grocery store. It’s a tough business to be in (making wine) and the labels and bottles are really a way to try to sell the wine. They can be pretty fantastic! That’s a decent collection of labels you found on Flickr. I actually bought a bottle of tea the other day that had an awesome label and I carefully pulled it off and saved it
Tracey,
Have you seen Doodlage? I love the doodles that RaShell shares!
Lucinda,
Same here. I just recently started looking at Flickr for inspiration and thought I’d share some of my findings!
Liam,
You’re welcome
I love going to flickr and just finding random pictures and groups. I have to say that it has become one of my favorite past times at work, aside from work of course.
Great collection of groups in this post. I’m going to have to go check them out.
Sander, thanks a lot for that link — what a brilliant idea that wine label tear off.
Lauren, you’re so lucky there for being able to buy alcohol in a grocery store. Here they sell it only in specialized and licensed liquor stores: government and private. The government ones are closed on the weekend and holidays, and after 6pm, while the private ones are always open till late but sell everything overpriced.
oh, almost forgot – Congratulations with over 1K RSS subscribers. Way to go! (btw, your updated AJAX edit comments plugin works just fine
)
Jacob Carter,
I get lost searching for inspiration from Flickr at work. There is so much!!
Vivien,
I bet you’ve had some more since Jacob’s feature on his top 10 favorite blogs, too. That was sure nice of him.
Wow, I didn’t realize buying liquor at the normal grocery store was not the norm everywhere. Sounds like too much government control to me… but this is not a political blog, so let’s not go there! Yeah, the boost in subscribers was sure a pleasant surprise this morning!!
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