Hi guys, Katakatica here :3 I actually wanted to write about something else but if I recall well, Jenday covered part of that in another tutorial, so I guessed that this could be more useful. However once I finish the poster I'm working on, I'll be making a step-by-step tutorial for something bubbly / cute, so stay tuned.

ANYWAY, enough about me.

For quite some time when browsing the site, I noticed something: many designers (me included) re-use the same textures / pictures / stocks. Again and again in an endless circle. This is fine if you have a lot of creativity of course, but spicing things up a bit will never hurt. How can you do that? By looking for new resources. Surely, the ones you have used before will always give you a sense of safety, but why shouldn't we designers try something new from time to time? 

I know that on devianatart, there are a LOT of textures that seem weird. Or overcrowded / too simplistic. But once you decide to go and look for, for example, 'angsty' textures, I still advise you to download what you find and like. Even if you think that you won't ever use it. Why?

It's very simple: our style changes over time. I have noticed this: first, we all try to do what others. It's mot quite copying, but something like that. We use similar stocks (or the same) similar pictures (sometimes not even HQ) and so on. However as we get more and more 'brave' in PS/GIMP, we slowly gain this thirst to have our own style. Of course, first tries may fail at this point because we have nothing to grab onto. We have to actually experiment. And here exactly do odd / too busy / too simple stocks / textures - etc. come into the picture. I caught myself struggling to find something cool on dA many times, only to realize that I chose something that I had already downloaded before. And at second look, it looked useful. 

Anything can be useful. This is something I don't think I can stress enough. To me, looking for resources is actually fun. I personally love browsing dA just to look around and find something cool / new / old / fresh. I know that some people may not enjoy it as much as I do, but it's really something that has to be done if one wants to be a good designer. 

What I think though, that you should only download resources that you like. Even if you saw many people use for example a bird PNG on cute posters, and you think you may need it. Sure, at one point you may like it, but until that, why stress over it? Only use what you like, too. 

Designing isn't really something that requires an incredible talent. I mean, okay, it's good if you can draw (I can't, and for example my placement / cutting is C-R-A-P) but it's not 100% necessary. What you need is patience and creativity. But you can only develope these (along with the skills needed to make a decent-looking poster) if you have something to work with. And well, we all prefer to work with what we like, don't we?

I'm not sure if this was useful or not, but this is all I could produce for now. I kinda have a feeling that you all knew this though <3