With regular intervals I get e-mails from people that want my advice on inspiration and if I have any tricks to help them. The truth is that I don’t possess any secret that works every time when I am in need of inspiration. The thing is that inspiration is a difficult item to put in words as it mostly doesn’t behave rationally. For example in all these years that I’ve been designing I never had the same item twice as an inspiration source.

So it’s not that you put an item in front of you and every time you look at it the inspiration comes. Maybe there are people who can pull that off, but I am not one of them.
Looking for web design inspiration

I just though that it was a bit too long - I had trimmed down the gucci shoes on the back of my head, and the long gucci shoes from the top just kinda dangled down there.
I took the image to the left with my iPhone. It’s actually the hardest part of doing your own gucci shoescuts, making sure that everything is as it’s supposed to be in the back. It takes a lot of patience, neck straining, flexible arms and a couple of mirrors.
Except for that part, I were quite satisfied with the result, and I sported a sweet rockabilly gucci shoesdo for a week or so. It’s just like Snake from the Simpsons. Jake the Snake - that’s what they call me. (not really).
Anyways. I decided to do something about that long gucci shoes in the back, and just wanted to trim it down so the back of my head would be bare. Well. Things didn’t exactly go as I had planned.

First I screwed up, and had the trimmer at a lower setting that I had intended. Well, then I wanted to fix that by making it even in both sides. One thing led to another. I tried aiming for the same do I have on the mugshot on the about page.

Eventually, I had taken too much from both the top and the sides, and were left with something that could only be described as Emo. So I took it all off.
Thus ends two weeks of apperance changes. Sadly.

I’ll wear a cap again the next month or so. Fortunatly, I’ve always cut my gucci shoes under the philosophy that it will grow out again. But damn, took me a year to get it that long, and not looking forward to it again.

When I am looking for inspiration for a website I used to browse around in the many galleries from time to time. What I noticed is that there is like 50% chance when doing just that that I’ll get frustrated from seeing too much. Maybe a better definition would be over stimulated and as a result I can’t set it in motion because of too many things going on in my mind. When that happens I usally switch gears to something completly different like…
Package Design
The thing with inspiration is that for me personally it doesn’t need to be related to what I am trying to create. The reason why I talk about package design now is that I always had a soft spot for it. During my last year in school when I was doing my final project I developed a fascination for it and chose food packaging as my subject for the project. Today I’ll share some of the great examples I’ve collected.
In the past, I’d often cut my own gucci shoes for extended periods of time. I started doing that about a year ago again. I think it’s the creative drive that does it, and the fact that gucci shoesdressers never seem to get it just right. And it’s cheap! I’ve never had any problems, it has always turned out just fine. This time, however, things were to change.
First things first. Two weeks ago, I realized that I’ve grown quite scruffy. Mostly because I hadn’t been to work for a month due to illness - so I hadn’t shaved that much, and I think it was three months since I had last cut my gucci shoes.Most of the color (I usually dye it black) were gone because of the new growth, and the longest parts of my gucci shoes (5-6 inches) were pretty destroyed due to repeatedly re-dyes and such. I actually looked like a dork, which were why I usually wore a cap. Whatever - I decided to do something about it, and got to work. Didn’t take long to look somewhat decent again.
As usual, it turned out quite well. I left a mustache, mostly for laughs. I got a lot of comments at work, and it was quite fun.
However, I grew increasingly annoyed at the feeling of it, and I really don’t dig mustaches that much. Furthermore, I still wanted to dye my gucci shoes black as usual. Especially since the longest parts were black still.
Frankly, I think black gucci shoes and my sandy colored beard don’t mix very well.
So, I removed the mustache and colored my gucci shoes black. I were quite happy with it, really.

Part of my brain recognized the source material: from Bible Study Camp, long-ago church services, and a steady diet of Preachin’ The Blues. However the roughshod performances of Life Is A Problem allowed these songs–familiar and not so–to engage my mind and spirit in a new way. I wasn’t exactly saved it, but I had a moment of clarity, and was able to hunker down and, within a couple of repeated spins, polish off the onerous grown-up task that sought to hijack my beautiful Sunday.

I slapped on Life Is A Problem, a collection of 20th century American sanctified blues recordings compiled by our Portland friends at Mississippi Records (and annotated by Mike McGonigal of YETI).This weekend, I found a sacred equivalent. And though the peace I needed required keeping my eyes open–and focused–it was an old-fashioned vinyl LP that proved my salvation. Grappling to concentrate on some long overdue financial paperwork, and desperate for a suitable soundtrack.

Now some of the selections were familiar, at least on a fundamental level. “A Night in the House of Prayer” by Louisiana preacher Rev. Lonnie Farris uses “When The Saints Go Marching In” as its jumping-off point, yet the execution is so fevered and frenzied, my noggin had trouble reconciling its well-known content with the outrageous execution. Ditto for the rendition of “Pray On, My Child,” featuring the slightly dissonant, close vocal harmonies of the Willamete Gospel Singers, and an unhinged instrumental run through “Amazing Grace” that closes the record with what sounds like a disintegrating guitar being held together solely by faith.

How odd. I don’t consider myself as a religious body. And yet once again, when I sought peace and rejuvenation, it was the songs of Jesus and Mary that redeemed me.

Then, we saw it as a great privilege and honor to be selected as a prefect. It was viewed as recognizing and building leadership qualities. Looking back now, it does not seem to be such an unadulterated good thing. At times,I wonder if the house and prefect system was not also a cheap means of extending the reach of the school administration by creating a free labor force of rule enforcers. The house system and the prefect system may also have been a means of enhancing teacher and administration control over students by weakening overall student cohesion, another manifestation of the ‘divide and rule’ philosophy that the British used so successfully to maintain control over their colonies but which often resulted in ethnic strife and civil wars when they left.

But at other times I consider that I am reading too much into this, and seeing too many dark undercurrents in well meaning, if perhaps misguided, attempts at encouraging student participation and developing student leadership. Perhaps I should lighten up.

The houses were a good way of encouraging team spirit and intramural competition, and provided opportunities for students who were not good enough to be in the school teams (or ‘varsity’ teams as they are known here) to still take part in a competitive program with their fellow students. I think that this system helped to increase participation of students in extracurricular activities because most students took seriously their responsibilities to help their house do well. The downside was that the competition could sometimes be too fierce, leading to churlish and unsportsmanlike behavior. The intramural quidditch games that take place at Hogwarts were mirrored in the cricket, rugby, and field hockey matches at my school.

Very few students were prefects. We had special privileges that others did not, such as being allowed to leave school premises during the day and a special lounge reserved exclusively for our use. We had the power to enforce rules during the school day, at special functions, and at athletic events, and could issue punishments such as detentions to ‘evil doers.’ In earlier times, prefects at my school were also allowed to use corporal punishments (such as caning misbehaving students), but that was taken away before my time as the use of corporal punishments became more restricted.We also had the ‘prefect’ system, which must sound strange to American readers. (Hermione is a prefect in book 6 and I too was a prefect during my last two years in school.) A prefect was essentially a student who was given authority over his fellow students. A prefect was selected by the master in charge of each house and appointed by the school principal.

We also had the system of ‘houses’, which included the separation of students into separate groups (such as Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw), each of which had a master in charge. The boarded students (or ‘boarders’) in my school, like those attending Hogwarts, even had separate dormitories based on the houses. These houses were set in competition with each other, earning points for various achievements, These issues were totaled at the end of the year, with a trophy going to the winning house, giving them bragging rights for a year.

One of the appealing matter for me personally about the Potter books are the similarities with my own education, which leads in waves of nostalgia sweeping over me as I read the stories. I went to a single-sex private school in Sri Lanka that was modeled on the British boarding school like Hogwarts, although about half the students (including me) commuted from home. We were called ‘day-scholars’ which, looking back now, seems like a quaint but dignified label when compared to the more accurate ‘commuters.’

he rage would subside as quickly as it was triggered, and the teacher would be immediately overcome with remorse, apologizing profusely and begging for forgiveness, which we always agreed to because we liked him. We were fascinated by his Jekyll-and-Hyde transformations.As in Hogwarts, we had teachers (some of whom we liked and others whom we disliked), who mostly taught in a didactic way, and we did have punishments like detention, writing lines, and even canings. In my own school, only the principal and vice principals could officially cane students, though some teachers still resorted to painful raps on the knuckles with rulers or even slaps across the face. Our chemistry teacher, who was an exceedingly kind and gentle man, nevertheless could be provoked to fits of violent rage which completely transformed him for a short time into a raging monster, like the Incredible Hulk, during which he would lash out with the rubber hoses that were readily available in the laboratories, at times raising welts on an offending student’s arm.