A Guide to Inspiration Hoarding

Image, Jesse Wilks

There’s one person I text more than my wife. My creative partner.

A few years back, I noticed something while scrolling through our chat history: mixed in with the odd baby or cat photo, was a goldmine of references.

A picture of a cool typeface on a flyer. A song we thought might work for a future project. A video showcasing a “wow, how’d they do that” camera transition. It was a catalog of all the bits of art, music, and design we’d stumbled upon and wanted to remember.

Somehow, in the process of consolidating what we thought was cool, we’d built a running archive of inspiration. A collection of stuff we could dip into the next time we needed a spark. Like say, a reference for an anthemic drum-and-bass track that builds to a crescendo. Or a fresh take on a type treatment. It had the power of saving us hours aimlessly Googling or searching. Spending less time on page 13 of a stock music site while we’re in an edit because we had the right reference at our fingertips.

Since then we’ve become more intentional about this practice. We save, organize, and borderline hoard anything that inspires us. The term “creative sponge” is thrown around a lot, but making a deliberate effort to catalog the best stuff has helped us do it with purpose and precision. Soaking up the very best.

It’s also given us a head start when trying to sell through work to clients or give better direction to production partners. No longer giving an audio house vague direction like “The voice over should feel wise…but with a bit of sly wit” and instead having a bang on reference of exactly what we mean.

How to Hoard Inspiration

1. Start a deck (or three)

“Alright, we just sold through a spot with a talking lamp post…who directed that hilarious spot with the two talking monkeys? We should work with them!”

We’ve had some version of this conversation a million times (just swap the talking lamp post for a type video, multi-media spot, a spot with practical effects).

This is where the deck comes in. Every time you see a spot you love, look up the director, their reel, and add them to a running slide deck. Include bullet points: dialogue comedy-driven, repped by X, based in Y. Keep a deck full of DPs, editors, photographers etc.—anyone you might want to work with.

We call ours the “Jesse and Gerardo Inspiration Directory 3000”. You should probably call yours something different. Here’s an actual screenshot of a slide we made when we came across some awesome cycling photography for a bike company.

(Oh, and the time we sold through some work that had some bike shots, we actually referred to this and knew exactly who to call)

2. Leverage Platforms

Spotify? Create playlists for inspiration. Mine are split into instrumental and non-instrumental tracks, and I revisit them constantly. Instagram? Use the “Save” feature. X (formerly Twitter)? Bookmark the good stuff.

Beyond that, keep folders—on your phone, your desktop, wherever. Screenshots of cool billboards, lighting references, or killer album art. It doesn’t have to be perfect or pretty. Just keep it accessible so you can always add to it.

3. Don’t just do this for the “creative process”

While much of this pertains to the production side of the creative process, and crafting and pushing the work, I think this practice can be useful for many of the disciplines in our industry. I was chatting with a strategist who saves every interesting article she reads in a Word doc with different categories relating to the industry (healthcare, banking, fast food). It was about 20 pages long, but she had saved anything that might inform a brief, or had a specific quote or insight that may help sell an idea.

4. Use AI.

One of the most useful AI related practices that I’ve worked into my creative routine is using it to search for tracks or references for me. In fact - my most recent search was “give me a list of electronic classical remixes that have a beat drop”. When you have really specific parameters of what you’re looking for, it can help bring up the right options about as quickly as you can type “give me a list of scenes from movies that use tracking shots”.

Make Your Love of Art Your Edge

When the world went remote, one of the main things I found myself missing the most was office banter. The random chats about the album someone couldn’t stop listening to or the movie you just had to check out. I kind of realized that that kind of chatter wasn’t just socializing; it was fuel.

I think most of us in this industry are drawn to art forms—music, film, design, photography—because they inspire us. And likely, nerding out on things like movies or graphic novels is probably what influenced a lot of us to go into this industry in the first place. Many of us probably practice some form of curation already, but hopefully this serves as a reminder to continue to do it, or do it more consistently.

Afterall, we are all constantly scrolling, watching, sharing and filling our brains with content. Taking time to catalog the things that move us—whether it’s a font, a film, or a photo—keeps our work fresh. The great thing about hoarding inspiration is that it turns your love of art into an advantage. The more we feed our brains with the best inputs, the better our outputs become.

Or at the very least on slow days, when you’re tempted to nod off to a movie, you can justify it as “work.”

Because, well, it kinda is.

Jesse Wilks is an award-winning Creative Director at Courage Inc. Though he's won many awards, the first time he was published in Applied Arts stands out as his favourite. He is one part of the creative duo Gerardo and Jesse. You can see their work at gerardoandjesse.com.