Before the holidays, a friend reached out to me and asked if I would speak to an informal gathering of the design community at SAP about the topic of inspiration. Since I don’t really do inspiration (meaning I don’t believe in it), I thought, “Nah. I’ll talk about something else more fun. Maybe I’ll dust off my Consistency is a Hobgoblin talk from World IA Day and talk about how often the simple explanation of good UX decisions gets turned around and used against us. But, as I was writing my response, I found myself disproving my own initial point.

I was about to use the Chuck Close quote “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work,” as justification for not doing a talk about inspiration, and then propose that I do a talk based on the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…” Clearly, I do take inspiration from somewhere, just not other people’s design work.

Instead, I proposed a talk where I break down “6-10” quotes that inspire my design practice, and how I use them to make decisions. However, as I was researching the quotes I would use, mostly to make sure I had them correct and attributed appropriately, I kept finding SO many examples of quotes I’ve used over the years, or that express similar ideas in nuanced ways, or that so perfectly support the principles of my practice that I absolutely will be hanging on to them for later, that I just couldn’t help myself. Soon 6-10 was 13, then it was 30. Could I do 30 quotes in 30 minutes?

Well, as it turns out, no, I cannot. Some ended up getting skipped for time. Since I already did the research, I decided to turn them all into a series of posts instead. I haven’t written anything for a while, and I kind of miss it.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I have no idea why you’d do that, but I appreciate it.