Life as a content designer: a few words on finding inspiration

Plenty of ideas arrive “just like that”, out of associations that surface in our heads on their own and out of all kinds of experience, but every content designer, even the best one, sometimes needs a longer moment to come up with something good. If you find yourself hunting for inspiration too, read on. We're sharing our own ways of looking for it.

1. Log off

As in almost every field – life is the biggest inspiration. People who work in social media are sometimes so absorbed in their work and in sitting online that when the time comes to think something up, they limit themselves to ideas they've already seen online. Log out of Facebook, leave the computer and go out to people, into town. Maybe an interesting film will inspire you, or an exhibition, a book… or maybe just people? Watch what is around you and you will see for yourself that the best ideas are sometimes lying in the street!

2. Start from the end

When you come up with a new post, do you usually start by thinking about its content, the text, the message? Try doing it the other way round for once – type in words you associate with a given field, look for photos that fit the subject you happen to be working on. Even if you don't use any of the photos you find, maybe one of them will open your eyes to new possibilities, or point you toward solutions that hadn't occurred to you before? Good-quality free photos are available on @Pixabay, for instance.

3. Stay current

Just about every content designer starts planning posts by checking the calendar. International Women's Day, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Grandfather's Day? Those are the occasions brand pages cover as a matter of course. It's also worth looking through a calendar of unusual holidays – a genuine goldmine of ideas. You'll find Pizza Day there, Mathematics Day, Forehead Kiss Day, Clean Off Your Desk Day… – plenty of holidays like that can be matched to whatever your page is about. Check whose birthday falls on a given day – maybe it happens to be someone connected to your industry? Or maybe the date is the anniversary of an event that matters to your brand?

4. Quote someone

Sayings, bits of wisdom – people online happily like posts with an interesting quote. Just type the phrase you're after plus “quotes” into your browser and the results will throw up a whole pile of well-known lines. You can also look for clips from cult films and series… It isn't only about copying them out – they can turn into the idea for a post, or steer your associations somewhere useful. They can also spark something while you're coming up with a new name. Lines built on an analogy are often easier for a general audience to grasp. Or maybe you'll be tempted to hang a motivational quote above your desk? Who knows, a saying like that might be exactly what kicks you into work every day.

5. Do it for laughs

There's probably nobody who doesn't like to laugh, or at least to smile. So why not approach a brand or a product with a bit of humor? Before you think anything up – go looking for inspiration in memes, dad jokes and other popular gags. Wordplay of every kind sells well on the internets, and meme makers are genuinely good at it. By definition a meme is a piece of cultural information stored in the brain. Maybe that piece of information is exactly the inspiration you need.

6. Catch the moment

A new craze turns up online every other minute, and plenty of pages pick it up. That's what's known as real time marketing – reacting to the latest cultural events and social phenomena. Being able to react to reality fast is one of social media's strengths, and it gives them a big edge over traditional media here. Remember San Escobar, the country Poland's foreign minister accidentally named in a TV interview, and how it flooded the whole of Facebook not long ago? Exactly! Sometimes it gets worse, when it's social media users who lose their heads over a trend. You probably also remember the millions of posts
with that popular challenge to companies, the ones that kept appearing on brand pages: “If this screenshot of our conversation gets 20 thousand likes and 5 thousand comments, you'll send me your product for free…” That is not the kind of inspiration we recommend.