Ideation doesn’t have to be limited to the precursor of a project. Yet, we creatives often keep the two tied together. Nothing bad happens when you aren’t ideating just for the fun of it, but incorporating it into your creative practices can broaden your mental models in unexpected ways, serve as inspiration for your leisure projects, or come in handy when you’re brainstorming your next client brief. We’re back again with a new iteration of creative exercises you can try with Dropmark to get those juices flowing.

Alien anthropologist: Collect images of things as if you’re seeing human culture for the first time. For instance, if an alien encountered a traffic light for the first time, how do you think they would capture it through a photograph? A naive approach to everyday items can inspire fresh perspectives on things you take for granted in your creative life.

Ad-lib your vibes: Try asking a question through a moodboard rather than words. For example: “What does this piece of music look like?” “What personality would this HEX code have?” or “What does this perfume look like?”

Decade immersion: Spend a self-imposed amount of time only referencing one era and collecting materials from that time. Don’t limit yourself to the visual arts here. Collect architecture, interior design, car design, fashion, etc.

Commute collection: On a day when you’re taking public transportation or walking to a destination, collect items from your journey. This practice can be a nice way to start finding inspiration in the mundane and challenge you to be present and take in the world around you in ways you may not normally engage.

Texture diary: Give yourself some amount of time to document all things texture: surfaces, materials, and unintentional patterns in things like rust or shadows.

Collect by emotion: Similar to the vibes exercise, but a little reversed. Collect things that make you feel a certain way rather than trying to create an aesthetic collection around a feeling.

We hope you give some of these exercises a try! Looking for more inspiration? Check out vol. 1

Structured softness. The cold weather has really settled in, and we’re reaching for a hint of warmth, softness, and playfulness. Here are a few things that we’ve been into recently.

GT Canon
A new release from Grilli and a bit no-nonsense (perfect for January and mother winter), Canon is a serif that “…aims for modern functionality rather than stylistic reinvention.” Built on digital drawing logic with a La Croix level nod to the pen, Canon is setting out to be a new reference point for serif typefaces.

Shades of halftone
A deep, hands-on exploration of creating halftone effects using shaders (GLSL) for the web. Like GT Canon, this halftone shader concept pays homage to the past while combining analog technology with the digital world to push creativity in a new direction.

Coat
Neutral. Clean. Slightly boxy. This chore jacket, inspired by a vintage find, is the kind of piece that makes everything else feel intentional.

Hobonichi Techno 2026
While this specific iteration is sold out (with no restock planned…sad), these very popular journals keep us inspired to get things done, even though the weather makes us want to stay in bed.

Rite of Way
A contemporary fragrance brand that feels atmospheric without being overwrought.

A Dictionary of Color Combinations Vol. 1
Forever relevant but recently discovered. A source of inspiration for so many types of projects, this pocket-sized manual of color will be endlessly useful.

Highlighted text with CSS gradient
Another analog gone digital moment. This CSS gradient effect is a playful way to organize information or call out specific elements in a CTA or something similar, as a new iteration of the penciled underlines and circles we’ve seen.

Gravity effect
Will never get tired of effects like this. Not a fan of the noises, but glad to have a reference to hold on to for later projects.

Cloud generator
Endless entertaining? Absolutely. This could absolutely be repurposed to create a great landing page for a website. There is an opportunity for a fun discovery moment or just a background animation for visual interest.

Interactive Liquid Gradient using Three.js
Gradients are still all over the place but we think that it’s always a good idea to change it up where you can and this subtle liquid vibe is feeling good.

Text frame border animation rotation
Fun take on a text marquee? Sign us up. Reminds us of some of the elements from a reverse engineer we looked at on the paper company GF Smith.

At Dropmark, we’re always curious about how creative people actually work, including the ways they find new use cases for the products they use. Below, our teammate Tylee walks us through how she transformed crafting supplies into a creative catalog and what she learned about making tools that work for real makers.

Having creative outlets is a lot of fun. Learning new ways to express your creativity is always a treat, and by treat I mostly mean the part where you get to collect new tools and supplies. There is nothing more thrilling than entering a craft store. They must put something in the air because they all have me itching to touch and explore the massive potential inside every aisle. Have I personally ever wanted to make jewelry? No. But do I think about it every time I see those glittery bins and needle-nose pliers? Yes. The downer is when you actually find what you went to the store for and realize you also need blue paint… but do you already have that shade of blue at home?

I recently became an avid knitter, and part of that hobby includes collecting a ton of yarn through project leftovers or aspirational yarn when I encounter a skein that is too beautiful to leave behind. The problem I’ve run into is the organization of it all. What brands have I used? What colors? What projects did I make? Do I already have some of this yarn at home? Dropmark has given me a simple way to design a digital catalog of my yarns. It’s been super helpful and fun, so I wanted to share how I did it.

First, I took “yearbook pictures” for each yarn that I have to use as thumbnails. Sorting my stash this way really let me see what colors I’ve been gravitating toward. A bit eye-opening, I’ll stay away from gray for a while. Each color is a stack labeled with the retail name, and inside each stack, I’ve linked to the online store or manufacturer. I’ve also added links to the patterns I used for each yarn. Again, I used custom thumbnails to display a photograph of my finished object so I can see how my own tension and knitting practice result in a particular fiber. Finally, I added tags for color and weight so that I can make searching my catalog simple.

The best part is, I’ve realized that this style of cataloging extends to other hobbies as well! A side benefit of this whole process is that I started this catalog as a way to organize things I can’t easily see all the time, especially when I’m out buying new yarns. But I’ve come away inspired by my other hobbies, like photography.

If you’re curious about creating your own catalog but aren’t sure how it translates to your hobby, check out our other examples below and give it a go!

Designers
Licensed fonts and projects you’ve used them on
UI kits
Illustration packs

Illustrators & artists
Brushes
Inks
Paper types

Photographers
Lenses
Film stocks
Presets

Dropmark is often where ideas begin, but it can also be where your creative system lives. When collections hold both inspiration and execution, you spend less time searching and more time making.
Your supplies stop being scattered. Your past work becomes useful again. And every new project starts with clarity instead of chaos.

Some designers fall in love with color, others with layout. But for Alessia, it was always type. Even as a graphic design student, she found herself drawn to the parts of a project that involved letterforms. Eventually, a realization clicked into place: she didn’t just want to choose typefaces. She wanted to draw them.

Type design offered the perfect blend of structure and intuition. “It’s about defining a system and an underlying logic,” she explains, “while leaving space for small surprises and specific, original details.” That duality of precision paired with humanity runs throughout her work.

Growing up in Italy meant being surrounded by a vivid typographic landscape: hand-painted shop signs, solemn cemetery inscriptions, pragmatic municipal wayfinding, and spatterings of expressive lettering. The coexistence of the formal and quirky, carefully planned and the charmingly imperfect, shaped the way she reads and interprets visual language. “I’m interested in how letterforms behave as a system,” she says, “but also in the local deviations that make them feel human.”

A process built on gesture, structure, and trying things in the wild

Guided by a structural idea or a detail she wants to explore or a specific feeling she wants the typeface to have, Alessia ditches the sketchbook for exploring directly in the font editor.  “I often think of letters as movements or gestures, and then try to understand how the outline would wrap around that movement.” Sometimes inspiration comes from observing movement in the world—a gesture, a bend, a shift in weight—and imagining how an outline might wrap around it.

Once a rough proof emerges, she defines the scope. Is this an expressive one-off display face or the seed of a multi-weight family? She focuses early on the defining weights and the features that give the typeface its voice.

When the design stabilizes, she exits the mindset of “type designer” and begins testing it in the real world. It appears in documents, teaching materials, and any setting where the type needs to perform quietly and confidently. “It’s the moment where I check whether the letterforms behave well alongside other content,” she explains, “and whether anything still feels distracting or unresolved.”

Typeland: A studio built on collaboration and curiosity

Typeland began as a simple portfolio necessity. A place to share type work separate from her graphic design projects after completing the MA in Typeface Design at the University of Reading.

Together with her partner, Vaibhav Singh, it quickly developed into a full-fledged studio. Since 2020, it has grown into a practice that publishes its own retail type library and takes on custom type and multi-script projects, with special expertise in Indic scripts and large pan-Indic systems. Working on projects like the Indian-script companions of Proxima Nova, their work sits at the intersection of research and practice across multiple languages.

One of their latest releases, Djaggety, is a pixel font that exemplifies Alessia’s process by beginning life in the classroom as a teaching tool. Its motto of less finessing, more accepting, embodies the human-centered approach to Typeland’s voice in type design.

Vernacular sources that inspire

While historical specimens and canonical references remain part of her research, much of her inspiration comes from the vernacular. She gravitates toward cemetery inscriptions, especially in small Italian towns where hand-carved or metal letters reveal idiosyncratic quirks.

…it is often those imperfect, very local bits of lettering that stay with me.

She’s equally drawn to aging shopfronts and vinyl-cut signage that has warped, peeled, or been patched over. Imperfection, she argues, often carries the clues that make letterforms compelling. Wood type specimens, with their scale shifts and color play, echo this spirited irregularity and remain a favorite reference point.

How Dropmark helps make sense of a chaotic camera roll

Like many designers, she relies on her camera roll to capture anything that sparks an idea, but the results can become unruly fast.

“I constantly take photos of things that catch my eye, then later I have no idea why a particular image felt important,” she says. Dropmark gives that impulse a loose but meaningful structure. Broad collections like color, packaging, signage, and layouts help her corral screenshots and photos into references actually worth revisiting.

On letters that delight (or don’t)

Ask her for a favorite letter, and she doesn’t hesitate: the “s.”

A successful “s” demands negotiation. It’s one of the most structurally revealing letters in any typeface. “It’s not enjoyable while I’m working on it,” she admits, “but when it finally clicks and sits comfortably with its neighboring letters, it’s very satisfying.”

There’s also a solid list of letters she doesn’t enjoy drawing (which her friends know well), but those remain off the record. In general, she loves letters that carry structural weight within a word, acting almost as proof of whether the typeface’s core idea is truly holding together.

A mundane archive with surprising charms

Asked what she’s Dropmarked recently, she mentions something wonderfully ordinary: supermarket own-brand packaging. Supermarkets craft internal visual languages to distinguish product tiers, often with surprisingly sharp typography or clever logos hiding in plain sight.

“It feels like a very mundane archive,” she says, “but it’s a good reminder that interesting design decisions are present in the most ordinary of contexts.”

Thanks so much to Alessia for chatting with us! Check out more of her work at her website, and check out more of Typeland or follow them on Instagram and Mastodon.

With retro illustration and playful UI/UX, Fishwife’s energetic branding hasn’t just made tinned fish sexy, it’s reminded us that packaging can be fun again. They’re not the newest brand on the block, but with the skies turning gray for winter, we were craving a dive into a brand built on bright color, bold imagery, and unapologetic playfulness.

Founded in 2020, Fishwife took a dusty pantry staple and brought it into the spotlight, turning it into both a cultural object and a lifestyle brand. Through eye-catching packaging and a thoughtfully whimsical digital experience, they’ve created an illustrated world you can hold in your hand and click through. Working with illustrator Danny Miller, their digital-first presence leans heavily on brand building and storytelling, shaping an identity that extends far beyond the tin.

Once we started picking apart the details, we found so many delightful choices: saturated color used with confidence, a serif + sans-serif type pairing that feels retro yet modern, subtle microinteractions, illustration-as-UI moments, and a dozen other details that come together to create a cohesive, charming experience. It drives a genuine compulsion to start a tinned fish obsession…even if you’ve never enjoyed a sardine in your life. Here’s some of what we found:

A color strategy that expands the packaging universe
Fishwife immerses you in a vibrant color palette. Each SKU has its own vibrant hue, and the website uses those colors as full-bleed backgrounds, section dividers, and product page accents. This creates instant recognition: the same color that hits you on the shelf greets you on the screen. Rather than defaulting to white, they let color do the storytelling.

Serif + sans serif type pairing that feels like retro-modern charm
The friendly serif Recoleta adds warmth and a touch of retro storytelling, reminiscent of old cookbooks. Paired with a clean sans serif, Albert Sans, for more minor details and product info, striking a balance between playful and practical.

Photography styled to amplify the packaging
Fishwife’s photography seems simple, yet it anchors the site’s visual rhythm. The tins feature photography with a simple, plain background that complements the color palette. Images are cleanly composed, with ample negative space, allowing the illustrations to be the hero. Product stacks, angled tins, and overhead shots add dimension to the compositions without clutter. Lastly, recipe images and lifestyle shots use soft, natural light and gently textured surfaces to balance the bold packaging.

Microinteractions that add life without slowing you down
Hover effects and subtly animated accents bring personality to each interaction. They are tiny moments that don’t feel gimmicky but more like a digital wink to the viewer. These microinteractions, like product card tilts, subtle JavaScript wiggles on handmade SVG illustrations, and the deep retro drop shadow on buttons, mimic the energy of the packaging illustrations, creating continuity.

Why it all works
The illustrated packaging sets the tone, the photography grounds it, and the UI/UX carries that energy into motion, interaction, and narrative. On the shelf, the tins are vibrant little objects. Online, they become portals into a larger illustrated universe.

Check out our brand dissection on Dropmark and get started on your own!

At Woodshop USA, we highlight thoughtfully made products for the home, from furniture and lighting to tools and everyday objects designed to last. The site started as a way to gather our favorite finds in one place, a curated mix of useful and beautiful things that reflect good design and material quality.

Behind the scenes, Dropmark keeps our process organized and visual. Whenever we find a new product or gadget that catches our eye, we save it to a shared Dropmark collection, adding tags for where it’s made and its category.

We also update the shop seasonally, rotating in new products and retiring older ones to keep the selection fresh. To stay organized, each rotation lives in a Dropmark stack, making past collections easy to reference. This makes it simple to revisit earlier curations, track how the selection has evolved, and build future assortments without starting from scratch.

Once the collection feels cohesive, we publish our selections using Siteleaf, the content management system that powers the site. Dropmark helps us explore and refine ideas visually, while Siteleaf gives us a clean, flexible way to share them online. Together, they create a simple workflow from inspiration to publication; one that keeps our focus on curation, design, and the joy of finding things worth keeping.