The Creative Process: Organizing Inspiration

A little while ago I told you about my love of sketches and scraplifting.  I get most my inspiration materials either from the internet (blogs and such) or from magazines (either print or digital) and books.  I'm still struggling to find the most useful way to organize and keep this inspiration so that its most useful to me.

One thing I'm sure of is that I want to keep it all digitally, for a couple of reasons:
1. It takes up less space - always a positive for me!
2. It's more portable - so I can access it anywhere anytime.

As soon as I get a chance, I'll scan in printed magazine pages and digitize it that way.

I began keeping sketches and inspiration photos using Evernote, a web-based program that allows you to keep digital data, including .pdfs, and access it anywhere.  It allows for tagging and multiple virtual notebooks, and has an app for the iphone.  I really like this program, but adding photos to my notebook became somewhat cumbersome.  I couldn't resize them, and you have to open each note to view the images.  I can't just scroll through the images all at once, or see .pdfs without opening them.

Recently I've switched systems to just saving images and .pdfs to a folder on my desktop.  This has been easier since I can use Picasa to view them all on a scroll.  On the downside, it is on my hard drive, so its not accessible away from that.

Either way, I divide my inspiration into the following categories, and file them away under each:

• one-page layouts
• two-page layouts
• embellishment inspiration
• home dec inspiration

Some folks prefer to organize by number of photos on a page.  I don't because I am usually able to adapt a sketch to fit my needs that way.

I'm still working on my system.  How do you keep your inspiration?  Have you found what works best for you?