Don’t wait around hoping to be inspired. Go out and actively pursue it. But it’s also not enough just to collect inspiration. You need to analyze it, and make sure you’re getting a balanced inspiration diet.

• Practical Inspiration: A spark when you see clever problem-solving in our field. X-RAY it!
• Internal Inspiration: A spark when you make time to let your brain rest and make connections. Squeeze the sponge!
• Energy Inspiration: A spark when you collaborate with someone else or explore skilled craftsmanship outside our field. Borrow their energy!

Turn to page 8 of your Spark Journal. First, assess if you currently have a balanced inspiration diet. Which one do you need to make more time for?

To improve the way you gather and use Practical Inspiration, whenever a graphic catches your attention, X-RAY it. You can keep track of your X-RAYs in a spreadsheet or a journal. I like the former because I can search for keywords or sort.

• X: Excited. What specifically got me excited about this graphic?
• R: Rules. How are they following data visualization best practices?
• A: Anarchy. How did they throw out the rules?
• Y: You. How might you use this in your own work? What are some conditions in which this would be useful?

Need some graphics to X-RAY? There are hundreds of wonderful visuals in the Data Visualization Society’s Information is Beautiful Awards showcase!

Listen to the audiobook of this section

In my Virginia neighborhood, you can’t blink twice without seeing a gray squirrel dart past. This is particularly true at my home, thanks to the majestic black walnut tree in our front yard. From my desk, I get a prime view of the frenzy as walnuts drop, drawing squirrels to crack them open and stash them all over the yard. That’s the thing about a squirrel’s habit of collecting nuts for winter; it’s a natural instinct to prepare for leaner times. A squirrel can’t wake up on the first day of winter and expect to find black walnuts still on the ground.

I can’t wake up on the first day of a project and hope to be brimming with inspiration; preparation is key.

⚡”Immature creative pros wait for inspiration. Mature creative pros chase it down.”

– Todd Henry in Daily Creative¹⁹

We need to make a habit of constantly gathering inspiration, but we often collect inspiration in a narrow way. Here are three types of inspiration we should be collecting:

• Practical Inspiration comes from a data visualization or infographic that solves a problem in an effective way. Example: you see a scatter plot in a newspaper that effectively shows a correlation between two variables, which inspires you to use a scatter plot to show a correlation in your work.
• Internal Inspiration comes when you’re resting or doing a different task, and you have space to make your own connections. Example: you’re wrestling with a problem, take a walk to take a break, and you suddenly realize the piece you were missing.
• Energy Inspiration comes from external sources not in our field that give you the spark of an idea or a bolt of energy. Example: you go to a museum and the superior craftsmanship in a particular exhibit gives you a bolt of energy to apply to your work.

Your inspiration can be categorized as multiple types, and the interpretation is completely up to you!

Do you rely on one type of inspiration more than any others? Let’s look at how you can more effectively collect and use each type of inspiration.

Find and Analyze Practical Inspiration

Collecting inspiration isn’t enough. We need to analyze it. We often look to others in our field for inspiration because it’s helpful to see how other people are innovating in the field. However, the way we approach Practical Inspiration often leaves us with a dusty stash and even feeling inferior and jealous of other people’s work. Have you ever admired someone else’s graphics and remarked how talented, creative, and skilled they must be? Did you feel like you would never get that good? I have, and I hate feeling like that. More importantly, it’s not helpful to the creative process.

That’s why I developed a system for analyzing Practical Inspiration. It instantly puts me in the team mindset. We’re solving problems, not competing. It also makes it more likely I’ll use this inspiration in the future. The system is called “X-RAY.” Whenever I see a graphic that I find particularly effective or interesting, I’ll analyze it like this:

• X: Excited. What specifically got me excited about this graphic?
• R: Rules. How are they following data visualization best practices?
• A: Anarchy. How did they throw out the rules?
• Y: You. How might you use this in your own work? What are some conditions in which this would be useful?

I like to collect these in a spreadsheet so I can quickly search for keywords. Analyzing graphics also helps me remember inspirational graphics that I’ve seen. This is a more effective way to collect walnuts!

A note on plagiarism

Some graphics are so inspiring that it feels like a crime not to imitate them! But there’s a fine line between being inspired and straight-up plagiarizing someone else’s work. It’s especially hard in data communication because no one owns a bar chart.

To make sure we don’t cross the line, it’s helpful to think about how a graphic is basically composed of three main elements: the data, the visual encoding, and the styling. If you pull inspiration from all of these elements and incorporate them into a single graphic, then it’s going to look an awful lot like copying. It’s also essential to include a note about who inspired you.

Here’s another way to avoid accidentally copying too much. Once you’ve completed your X-RAY analysis of a graphic, put it away when you start creating your work. I’ve found that if I keep referencing it as I’m designing, then I’ll surely end up copying more than I should.

Give your Internal Inspiration a chance to be heard

Let’s say you’re working on a project, making progress, and flipping through the Practical Inspiration you’ve gathered. But now you’re stuck and not making progress anymore. This is the time to lean on Internal Inspiration. Give your brain a chance to digest and connect those dots that you’ve been collecting.

⚡Resting is a form of inspiration, too.

When you’re washing the dishes, you’re constantly squeezing out the sponge. Why? It’s too full of soap and water to do a good job scrubbing. It’s the same when your brain gets too full of information—it’s not effective at solving problems anymore and you need to squeeze it out.

You’ll hear this from professional creatives time and time again: go for a walk, take a shower, just do anything away from your work.

Neil Richards, author of Questions in DataViz and global data fluency lead at JLL, says that he gets the most creative ideas while on the treadmill despite his aversion to the physical activity itself. “That’s almost an incentive for me to do it, thinking maybe I’ll get off and I’ll have another idea to scribble down and put to one side for a future project.”²⁰

RJ Andrews, author of Info We Trust and consulting data storyteller, says that he’s most creative in the morning so he plans to have two focused work sessions in the morning. I asked what he does in between those sessions.

“So in between, I often exercise then because my mind is kind of like turned to mush. Like when I’m swimming in a pool, paddling on my kayak, running, or even slugging lead, then part of my brain is occupied doing the activity. It frees up the rest of it to kind of wonder and have thoughts. I think of it as free-association time, but it’s time that your mind can wander. That’s similar to when you’re under a hot shower and you have these mental wanderings. You can achieve that without always jumping in the shower.”²¹

Now that I’ve learned how important Internal Inspiration is to my creative work, I find myself having thoughts like, “I have so much creative work to do today, I’m going to need to take a lot of walks!” I’ve come to learn that taking time for Internal Inspiration is an important part of the ideation and problem-solving process.

Take the time to squeeze out your sponge so your brain can help make important connections.

Pursue new Energy Inspiration

The last part of a healthy inspiration diet is Energy Inspiration. Here, we’re looking outside of our field and ourselves to find things that give us a spark of energy. This can be from creative expressions in other fields, like cinema, architecture, art, or even collaborating with other creators.

⚡Magical things happen when you look around your environment and fold other people’s passions into your work.

In 2021, Mesa Schumacher was in the middle of a huge project called Project Animalia²² where she’d illustrate an animal every single day for a year and post it on Twitter. I was impressed by the way she captures the beauty and detail of a wide variety of animals. At the time, I was experimenting with creating repeating patterns, and seeing her skillful work inspired me to create a pattern based on her animal illustrations. I asked Mesa if it would be OK if I used her art as a jumping-off point for a repeating pattern, and she said yes!

So, I created a fun pattern, shared it on Twitter, and to my surprise and delight, Mesa was immediately inspired to draw a piece of clothing for the same animal using my print!

We were both giddy to see each other’s work and admire each other’s skills. Collaborating with other people is a fun exchange of energy! Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu, both award-winning data visualization designers and artists, collaborated on a yearlong project where they’d each visualize a topic from a different perspective. The project pushed them both creatively and ended up as a book called Data Sketches. Shirley said the collaboration helped push her to use new tools, and Nadieh discovered that getting feedback from Shirley throughout the process improved her critical thinking about her work.²³

But you don’t need to fully collaborate with someone on a project to get a spark of Energy Inspiration. It can be as simple as talking through your project with a friend or discussing the project with an expert. The back-and-forth is an effective tool to spark an idea or make a connection.

⚡The goal of Energy Inspiration is to have an experience outside your bubble and borrow some of the passion that other people have for their craft.

This can come from any field, but most commonly we find inspiration from art galleries, museums, theater, dance, concerts, music, or architecture. While interviewing Gabrielle Mérite, an accomplished information designer and data illustrator who focuses on social good, she told me that movies often inspire her. But she doesn’t just watch movies, she analyzes them: “I find it really interesting to wonder how they make this mood in this specific scene? Is it the lighting? Or the angle of the camera? I take notes on movies to analyze what I like or what I respond to, and that really helped me in the long term.”²⁴

Gabrielle uses her notes to find patterns that she can use in her own work. She emphasizes that you should enjoy creative works but always be asking yourself: Why do I like this? Why do I specifically find this pleasing? Why do I respond emotionally to this? You can even use the X-RAY technique to analyze your Energy Inspiration. Another small action you can take today: tell a friend about your latest project and ask them if it reminds them of anything they’ve seen lately.

Overall, make time to explore creations and creators outside of our field. You’ll gather more tools to use and find yourself borrowing the excitement they have for their craft.