Evernote for Design Inspiration

[Jenn Vargas 0]

Evernote + Skitch are probably two of the most-used tools in my design arsenal. I'm constant clipping bits of site designs, annotating them with Skitch and then dropping them into my Evernote. Generally I'll tag a clip with things that I think will be helpful in the future like "color scheme", "navigation", "typeface" so when it comes time to work on a new design I can easily sift through my collection of clips for inspiration.

How do you use Evernote for design inspiration?

[klang 38]

Welcome Jenn! A few of us Skitch design folks have a shared folder for interesting UI ideas we see around for inspiration.

Also: here's a 3rd party tool for searching your Evernote notes by color that you might like: http://www.colorstache.com/

[Ben Henschel 0]

Clipping design inspiration is what got me into using Evernote in the first place. I'm constantly clipping either whole websites, or certain design components. Dribbble is definitely a great site for finding inspiration and I love being able to clip the square screenshot and be good to go. Also clipping color palettes from Colourlovers is definitely worthwhile.

I would love to use Skitch to annotate clippings and make notes, but honestly having to have two programs open and switching between the two just really breaks the flow of things. So unfortunately I find myself never using Skitch. Any chance we'll see Skitch merge completely into Evernote?

Bro, Colorstache looks sick, definitely gonna have to try that out.

[Emma Davis 0]

Welcome Jenn! A few of us Skitch design folks have a shared folder for interesting UI ideas we see around for inspiration.

Also: here's a 3rd party tool for searching your Evernote notes by color that you might like: http://www.colorstache.com/

Thank you for the heads up on colorstache - fantastic tool.

[chrisWhite 0]

I recently switched to Evernote for keeping design inspiration but I'm still testing it. In the past I've used plain files & folders, iPhoto and most recently LittleSnapper but manually adding metadata was too much work. Now what I'm doing is grabbing the image from a site or snapping it with Skitch and dropping it into a new note. Then I grab a screenshot of the entire site for context, tags, metadata and who the artist is.

What I don't like is not having a better way to browse through images but Colorstache helps. I don't like the way the Snippet View (on the OS X Evernote client) creates an thumbnail from the center of the note rather than the top, I wish it worked like the Thumbnail View.

What I'm curious about is how you guys handle tags. I find it messy having the same tags for both inspiration and all my other notes. Setting something to a 'UI' tag adds hundreds of inspiration items that I have to filter out when i want to find an article about designing UIs. It's easy to filter from the desktop but more difficult on the iOS clients. I've settled for 'UI inspiration' but it's a lot of extra superfluous clutter to add on the end of a tag.

Perhaps I'm being too OCD.

[Owyn 457]

Create saved searches for the most common Inspiration usages, e.g. "all: tag:inspiration tag:ui", etc.

Name the searches appropriately to make them easy to find, and, grouped together.

You can then quickly call up them up from the iPhone via the Evernote Search button.

[chrisWhite 0]

Perfect, thanks! I hadn't thought about using that.

[Mark923 26]

Colorstache is pretty amazing.

[Hardik Shah 0]

Colorstache (the website) is no more active! Is there any alternative?