If limitation spawns creativity, is the limitless resource of the Internet a good thing? Does it do more harm than good to read all these blogs?
– Alec Soth, “http://blog.magnumphotos.com/2008/12/sad.html”

Creative inspiration and influence always seems to be a hot topic in the field of design. If we’re all honest, we’d admit that our entire lives are spent absorbing others’ creative work — eyes open, our design sensibilities are affected by all the the graphic design we come across in our daily lives — print, TV, and internet. Our taste filters out the bad, and we consciously and subconsciously respond to all the work that’s come before us. It’s the dialectic arc of art that I’m confident is neither good or bad — it’s simply the way things are.

In fact, I’m always a skeptic of those who claim to be pure and chaste from influence — they just seem boring and defensive. If you’re not living and breathing design and art, you’re not going to produce compelling work. Influence, so long as it’s not wholesale cribbing, is a Good Thing.

But the internet changes things quite a bit. Unless protected against, the intertubes leads us creatives into becoming ‘obsessive compulsive inspiration consumers.’ With all the great image blogs and design gallery sites going around now, it’s tantalizingly easy to get swept up into being an inspiration addict. The real issue isn’t that we’re cribbing too much from others — rather we’re just not working enough on our own work.

All this attention to ‘what’s out there’ takes up valuable time that we could be using pushing our own work. I’m finding that the most successful of my designs come when I simply work harder and longer on my comps and do a touch less ‘research.’ I take frequent breaks, try as many different layouts, colors, etc. as I can, and then settle on the best solution. Influence from others work and great design patterns seeps in naturally — I don’t need to spend time surfing blogs to know what’s the status quo in web design at any given moment. When I focus and work hard, my work is unquestionably better.

Resist the repetitive

For me though, it’s a bigger problem than just pursing design inspiration sites. I’ve become slowly addicted to impulsively, repetitiously ‘checking up’ on a handful of sites, an absurd number of times throughout the day. I pull them up during any lulls in my work — just finished a bunch of emails, time to stop by 37signals.com and see what they say about web development. Finished a new comp — time to see what interesting links Kottke’s pulled from outta nowhere.

While they’re some of the best blogs on the net and worthy reads, I feel like I’m looking at a car crash on the highway — I just can’t stop staring. All day long. It interrupts my workflow, and kills my productivity. It needs to stop.

Well, the first step is admitting the problem — fixing it is as simple host file block list. Yep. Just take them out of your life until you’ve found how easily you can live without them. Here’s how to do it on a Mac:

• Pull up Terminal.app
• Type “sudo nano /etc/hosts”
• Add a line for each site like this “127.0.0.1 www.sitename.com sitename.com”

It’s only been a few days since I’ve done this, but my days feel lighter already. If you find yourself ‘checking up’ more than you should, it’s worth a try to block out a few distracting sites.