Using Dropmark to kickstart your creativity

We already know that Dropmark is an excellent tool for your creative projects…but what happens when your creativity becomes the project? Creative slumps happen to the best of us. Aside from throwing away your computer, moving to the countryside, and becoming a farmer, the easiest way to get over blank page syndrome is to engage in some good old-fashioned creative exercises. We’ve come up with a few ways to use Dropmark in your own practice, and well, even if you do end up moving to the country and becoming a farmer, you can still use Dropmark to catalog your seed library and plot out your next crop rotation.

1. Shake the cobwebs loose with a five-minute brainstorm. More effective than five-minute crafts on TikTok, set a timer for 5 minutes and create a Dropmark collection around a specific topic or idea you want to explore (e.g., “sustainable architecture” or “unexpected color combinations”). Don’t overthink here! Just relax and gather anything that grabs your attention in those 5 minutes. Review afterward and see if any unexpected patterns or connections emerge.

2. Try using the heuristic ideation technique to create a mood board based on two random or opposing themes/concepts (e.g., “futuristic nostalgia” or “urban nature”). Gather 10 images and blend them into a cohesive mood board. Share it with others and see how well the themes worked together and whether you effectively communicated your theme.

3. Reverse inspiration hunt! Start with a finished design or piece of artwork that you admire and reverse engineer the process by gathering materials that could have inspired it. Find images, textures, colors, and quotes that may have been used to inspire the final product.

4. Try storytelling through color palettes. Create a Dropmark collection of five to ten unique color palettes. Each palette must tell a specific story or mood (e.g., “the feeling of a rainy day” or “a retro video game vibe”). Use images, digital art, HEX codes, or objects that represent each color palette, and write a brief description of the story behind the palette.

5. View everyday objects through another lens. Pick a random everyday object (e.g., a chair, a spoon, a notebook), and create a Dropmark collection of innovative, artistic, or unexpected versions of that object. Try to collect a few items every day for a week.

6. Design trend explorer. Use Dropmark to track a specific trend from different industries. Create a collection featuring examples from these fields that showcase the trend and note how it is interpreted in various contexts. The resulting collection can give you insight into cross-industry inspiration.

7. Try a 30-day inspiration challenge. For 30 days, add one new item to your Dropmark collection each day, but it must be something that inspires you in a completely different way than the day before. For example, day 1 could be a photograph, day 2 a song, day 3 typography, etc. At the end of the month, review your collection and reflect on how diverse sources of inspiration impacted your creativity!

We hope you give some of these exercises a try! Sometimes, it’s hard to know where to look for inspiration, and we’ve all been there. And remember, if all else fails and none of the above works, we will still be here when you decide to become a farmer. 🌽