Beautiful design inspiration for your next Word doc

Hi, in this video we're going to look at getting started with a monthly newsletter for a company. Now it's going to be a lot more tools that we're going to learn, but also there's a lot more creativity that goes into it. So if you are maybe new to design, or at least, like me, get a bit stuck, doing the same old stuff, you need inspiration, probably the quickest and easiest way is to look to people that are already making beautiful stuff, see what they do, and-- We're not going to copy, but we're going to kind of use it as inspiration for our own stuff. You'll find like--

I like the term appropriation. By the time you kind of look at the format, you're like, “I like that,” you changed your fonts, you used your color, your images, your content, it's inspired by, but it's not a direct copy of.

The way to get inspiration for your next Word document is to look at great graphic designers, and often, this site here, behance.net is where people, where designers go and post their portfolios. Really good stuff. You could use Google images, the problem with Google images is that, just that much trash in there as there's good stuff, whereas Behance tends to have really amazing, beautiful stuff. 

So, come into here, over here on the right, type in 'Search'. You can put in 'company newsletter', or whatever you're looking for, a letterhead, but often I find, the easiest one to go to is 'annual report'. I know we're not making annual report, but it's the one that people spend a lot of money on, and often have a lot of copy to deal with, and can be really good kind of inspiration for us. Then you can start going through, and either hold down the control key, and click on a few of them, so-- 

He looks good. If I hold down ‘Control’ while I'm clicking, you can see, they kind of open up in their own tabs. You can just go through one by one, up to you. I'm just kind of going through things I like the look of, and then just start going through, and saying, "Do I like this?" I like the font, I like this kind of Slab Serif here. It's really cool, spacing after, it's really cool when there's white on black ink. You might not be able to do white on blacks, you might do something similar, but with black text on a white background. That's kind of cool, they've done this columns with the column style.

So, this is the kind of inspiration that I'll sift through, and go through and say, "I like that, I like that." What do I like about it? This is quite cool, it's all gray scale, and it keeps printing cost down, and if you use that corporate color, you might switch over to your corporate color, your fonts. I like it how it kind of splits across pages. Now I'm just kind of waffling, but you get the idea.

Go through these things, find the stuff you like. That's really cool, that's kind of slabbyy color, but a gradient going on, and then, once you get an idea what you want to do, you can start building yours in Word, and that's what we're going to do in the very next video.

So, inspiration’s done, let's get making.