Don't Forget To Take Time To Be Inspired

I really just want to share a cool aha moment of inspiration.

This past week I had been literally spending every waking hour of the days working on a design for our new training program. Now I'm not a graphics artist but I'm also not without skills. However, I found myself stuck on a design that started out to be simple but ended up getting more difficult. Basically, we had originally designed the training program to have three levels and the flier would have those three levels represented on the front with pictures of people at the various levels of certification. And then we realized the program actually needed a fourth level. I'm not going to get into how or why, it just needed to have a fourth level. So now my design fell apart simply because the basic layout I had been designing around would not allow for four pictures across and present well. Suffice to say there was a level of detail in the pictures that needed to come through. And you can't jsut cram all that artwork into one band across the middle of a page.

Below is what I had laid out at this point. Note that this is still in design phase so much of the information is not relevant. I was just trying to get the layout of the pictures, as they are the focus, and then I could figure out all the necessary wording.

I was pretty frustrated about the layout no longer working because although I have some skills, I am not a pro, and a pro would just think up a new design. And for the record, I don't have the budget to have a pro do this flier nor the time. So, I must give proper credit where credit is due. Laura (who was already one foot out the door says to me, "You're frustrated, you need to step away, why don't you come to the gym with me". I however was smart enough to say. "Yup, let's go". And I'm so glad I did.

Our gym is YouFit. If you've never seen it is's purple and Green. I'm talking Lime green and real purple. I get on the treadmill, turn on some tunes, and I go for a jog. I never watch tv on the treadmill or on any of the many hoisted up high on the walls. As I got to my cool down, I started to look around to find Laura and people watch. (Always funny, people watching at the gym.) And an interesting thing caught my eye. It was the display on the elliptical machine. The graphic below is pretty low res but the idea is that there are several graphics each in their own circles laid out along a curve. I swear I actually hear a "Ding" in my head when the bell went off.

I wiped down my machine and walked off with a grin on my face thinking "How fortuitous was this? And I got a couple miles in!" So as soon as I got cleaned up and back to my desk, I went on to redesign the front of the flier in very short order (see below).

I really love it when you have an aha moment and it catapults you to the next big thing. As I always say; This is getting to the next level. And I was just one step away!