For most designers, the desk is where the work is supposed to happen. You sit down at your desk, open your design tools, stare at the screen for a bit, and wait for the idea to show up somehow. Sometimes it does. But other times, the more you sit there trying to force it, the further away you get from a brilliant idea.
It made me curious: where do designers actually get their best ideas?
Is it really at the desk… or somewhere completely different? So I asked a few members of our design team a simple question: what’s the most random place you’ve gotten a design idea? Their answers were quite interesting.
Opeyemi: Inspiration Shows Up When You Least Expect It
For Opeyemi, inspiration has a habit of showing up at the most unexpected times. A few weeks ago, he had been going back and forth with a client over a design. You know the kind of situation where you’re trying different things, adjusting details, but nothing quite feels right.
The idea just wasn’t clicking.
Then the next morning, while casually scrolling through WhatsApp statuses, he noticed something: a font someone had used on their status update. It was such a small thing, but it caught his attention.
The moment he focused on it, something clicked. The direction he had been struggling to find suddenly became clear. He tracked down the font, and just like that, the design idea followed. According to him, this kind of thing happens often. Sometimes inspiration comes from random objects, sometimes from things he notices during the day. And occasionally, the ideas even show up in his dreams.
Of course, not every idea ends up working out, but enough of them do to make those random moments worth paying attention to.
John & Warith: The Unexpected Creative Side of Instagram
For John, the most random place his ideas come from is surprisingly simple: Instagram.
It might seem like just a place to scroll through content, but sometimes seeing a layout, a color combination, or a small design detail can spark something new.
An idea starts forming from something you weren’t even intentionally looking form and before you know it, that random inspiration turns into a direction for an actual design project.
Ibrahim: Sometimes the Best Move Is to Walk Away
Ibrahim has noticed something interesting about his creative process.
If he spends around thirty minutes stuck on a design problem at his desk without making progress, chances are the solution isn’t going to appear there. Instead, his best ideas usually come when he steps away from his screen, especially when he goes for a walk.
According to him, a change of scenery can do a lot for your perspective. Once you’re away from the screen, your mind relaxes a bit, and suddenly things start to make more sense. More often than not, the idea shows up when he’s no longer actively trying to force it.
Kareem: When Ideas Show Up in Dreams… and Traffic
Kareem shared two moments that perfectly capture how unpredictable creativity can be.
The first happened while he was working on a manipulation project, the kind that involves heavy image composition and visual storytelling. He had been working on it late at night but couldn’t seem to come up with the right idea to execute it.
Eventually, he decided to sleep and try again in the morning with a fresh mind. The problem was that he was also working against a tight deadline, so the pressure was very real. That anxiety must have followed him into his sleep, because something interesting happened.
He ended up dreaming about the project, yes, you read that right, he dreamt about it and in that dream, the idea finally came together. By the time he woke up, he already had the direction he needed.
The second moment happened during another project that initially felt overwhelming. After reading through the project details and seeing how sophisticated it was, he simply closed it. No ideas were coming to mind at the time. Later, while driving home, he got stuck in traffic.
As he waited, he found himself scanning his surroundings. That’s when a billboard nearby caught his attention. Something about the design made him pause and study it for a moment, and just like that, the idea for his project clicked. At the time, Kareem used to carry a pen and a small jotter with him. So he quickly picked them up and sketched out a rough concept right there in the car.
Sometimes inspiration really does arrive when you’re not sitting at your desk. So, Maybe Creativity Needs a Little Distance. If there’s one thing these responses show, it’s that creativity rarely sticks to a schedule. Designers may spend most of their time at their desks building and refining ideas, but the spark that starts those ideas often happens somewhere else, during a scroll through social media, while noticing something random, or during a walk outside.
Maybe the trick isn’t forcing creativity to happen at the desk.
Maybe it’s knowing when to step away from it.
Because sometimes the best ideas don’t appear when you’re staring at the screen.
They show up when you’re doing something else entirely.