Thomas Leigh Diary

The "out-of-nowhere" inspiration phenomenon

Here I'm going to describe one of many examples illustrating a quite unique way of gaining inspirations (in My case for the purpose of computer graphics design).

One of most common and ordinary thing We do while using computers is working with windows. I mean those perfectly-known windows which You can drag, move, resize, and so on.

One time after I've just opened some window something drew My attention: the window was overlapping on one of the desktop icons - which created an interesting visual effect. I associated it with a CSS-made border, a pretty elegant one :) - and I thought I'd really like to simply recreate that border directly in CSS code (especially because I find it appealing). So I did that and... voilà :) ! I have My fine border which I applied into all <blockquote> elements on this site (like at the bottom of this article) - so it looks even better (regarding My taste).

As I've mentioned, this type of inspiration arising "out of nowhere" is not a rare occurrence alongside My experience. Another time I've encountered it was when I looked at some photo of sheer curtains. Light, shadow and folds created an abstract composition in which My mind saw a very specific picture - like a sign (on top of this article You can see the attached, enhanced fragment of that photo - and My final reproduction). Interestingly, it was visible for Me only with the particular zoom scale. It caught My fancy so much so at least I had to try to render it in Adobe Illustrator (because I was going to make it as a genuine, vector logotype, having in mind its future use). I've succeeded and had My new logo done :) .