The best designs, whether online or off, often make the best use of their medium. This might seem obvious but is often what keeps a good design from achieving its full potential. When you get your hands on a great work of print design you get a little tingle.  Every piece just works.

The fonts work perfectly together. That large serif balances the small sans. The margins are a pure manifestation of the golden ration. Even the paper itself is paired exactly with the choice of color and imagery. It all works. These little perfections are the result of hundreds of years of tweaks and hacks.  Each letter of the fonts you see every day are the result of the combined work of a dozen geniuses each building on the work of their predecessors. These men, and a sad truth of design history is the exclusion of women from the profession, made these letterforms by hand out of metal and wood crafting each ascendor with careful precision. They travelled to Italy to see firsthand the perfect proportion of the far-older letters carved into Roman ruins in the hope of mimicking these stone edifices in their fonts.

Each generation hoped to improve incrementally on the last and it is in this tradition that many designers for the media of today are looking to this older work for inspiration and guidance.

One unavoidable lesson is the insatiable attention to detail of the old masters of the craft.  The power to create color and form in an instant given to us by Adobe products were unimaginable even a few decades ago. From the medieval illuminated manuscripts to the packaging design of the early twentieth century, each detail was carefully chosen because a revision often meant having to start over.

The modern designer must attempt to achieve this same clarity of purpose and focus. Each detail should be deliberate. Linger over each pixel.  Nudge a little this way or that until the right balance is achieved. A cursory survey of the best sites reflect this sensibility. Texture is created from slight variation in the bottom and right border of a box.  A subtle gradient at the intersection of two color fields blends them and allows the eye to dance between. A subtle fleeting shadow in the top corner of a box, a fading frame, an enlarged first letter; these all show the hand of the craftsman at his best.

When faced with a design challenge most designers do the same thing: we look for inspiration.  This may sound obvious but this act is fraught with controversy.  At what point does inspiration become plagiarism or theft?

We all see great design every day. Billboards and TV marketing.  Glossy print pieces that devour the articles in magazines.  We are surrounded by design as we navigate our physical world.  But designers have it even worse.  We pay attention to all of this stuff, to what most people see simply as noise.  If I'm designing a logo that contains a certain tricky letter combination, my mind is on the prowell for how it's been done before.

The problem is that once I find some really smart usage of what I'm trying to solve it takes over my mind and I can't come up with a better idea.

At least not until I tune out.

This balance between input and silence is one of the hardest challenges facing designers.  Very few of us get to be great.  The likelihood that you are Charles or Ray Eames, William Caslon,
Paul Rand, or any of the greats is very low.  But the possibility of some form accomplishment is further diminished if you can't find a way to just process all the inspiration around you without more input.

Look at those good ideas, really look at them.  Process what little visual tricks and techniques are being employed and then turn it all off.  Focus on the problem in front of you.  Identify it's constraints and then just start working.