Q: What are the best ways to participate in the digital design community online? I want to find inspiration in the work my peers are doing.
Here’s a thing that I do when I feel stuck at work: I open a new tab and go to Designer News, or my Medium feed, or whatever else, and I settle on a likely-looking link to click. Then I skim it, and mentally file it in one of several categories:
A technical treatise urging me to replace some part of what I do with more Javascript
A breathless recommendation for a prototyping tool, of which there are roughly six dozen apparently equivalent competitors
An article that tells me I don’t understand design unless I’ve seen all the right documentaries
A case study of somebody’s app, resplendent with artfully skewed and zoomed screenshots — or better yet, animated GIFs — of lovely, thoughtful UI elements
An in-joke
And then I decide I’m not that stuck, so I close the tab and go back to work.
