But what do you do when you find the copy that you spent weeks writing and rewriting for your new company website has just been lifted by another design company?

Bizarrely, this is exactly what happened to us a couple of weeks ago.

An email from an online friend suggested we check out a company called Relik Creative in Columbus, Ohio, because the copy seemed a bit, well, similar…

It wasn’t similar, it was identical. The main body of copy from our newly launched toggle website had been lifted wholesale. The copy we must have re-written at least a hundred times, the copy we had debated and polished for hours was working hard for another design company.

Obviously, we were not happy campers. So we calmed down a bit and contacted Relik Creative’s owner, Alex Boorman, and politely asked him “WTF?”

To be fair, he immediately took the copy down from his site (but then again, he was pretty much bang to rights…) Alex said that he’d hired a virtual assistant to write it and his lawyers would be taking it up with them immediately. He said he was as angry as we were and at the time we had no reason not to believe him…

But the weeks have rolled by and Alex won’t give us the Virtual Assistant’s name, or the details of his lawyers who insist that he can’t pass it on.

It also seems strange that a company which offers a copy-writing service would hire a VA to bang out what most independent creatives would consider to be the single most important piece of copy they’ll ever write.

And the trouble with the internet is that while our copy is gone from the Relik Creative site, happy clients who thought it was great have pasted it on their site as a tribute to Relik’s creative genius.

Alex Boorman has stopped returning our emails, claiming he’s far too busy with clients to deal with this issue.

We think we’ve been really patient with Alex and have done all we can to try and make sense of it. If you’re a US newspaper or TV journalist who’s beat includes Columbus, Ohio, you might want to pick up the story. We’d be happy to pass on all the emails and screenshots.

Alex, we gave you the benefit of the doubt for as long as we could, but we think you’re guilty. Guilty of online theft and – maybe worst of all – guilty of trying to use the “a big boy did it and ran away” defence in the 21st Century…

I think it is very easy to become over saturated. I read design magazines, I subsribe to design feeds, our office is full of books, we have posters on the walls and I collect lots of things that inspire me. I feel that looking for inspiration in these places can sometimes be part of the problem. You are bombarded with nice typography, great layouts, colour schemes and fantastic ideas. This gets your creative juices flowing and you start to think about all the little elements you want to add to your final solution. But no matter how hard you try to shoe horn them all in, they just don’t fit.

Talking

Sitting silently at our mac with our tunnel vision hats on not suprisingly doesn’t do much good. When we get a new brief, we’ll talk about the project, our ideas and usually come up with ideas we wouldn’t have thought of if we’d just sat in silence. Sometimes I can be talking about something I am having difficulty with and from doing that I can end up answering my questions I didn’t think I had the answer to.

Doing something else

…even if it’s just answering emails. We often find having a short break and doing something else for a while gives us a fresh perspective on what we are doing.

We have been doing some branding for a natural body care site we will be launching very soon. We had done plenty of brain storming, sketched, looked in plenty of books but didn’t feel like we had quite arrived at our solution. At the weekend when I was in the shower that I noticed the way some some soap suds formed on a bar of soap. Seeing this then gave me some ideas and we went and created the final brand.

Eating

toggle loves eating. If we get stuck, we will grab some food – usually Cadburys buttons from the local shop :) Taking time out to feed our brains seems to work wonders for producing ideas.

Walking

We are lucky enough to have the River Thames at the back of the office. Not only a great place to eat lunch but also a great place to go for some ‘thinking space’.

Sketching

We think sketchbooks are a great dumping ground for ideas. I think it gives you a different kind of freedom than you get from the computer because it’s a quick fire round of ideas. By looking at these ideas in their most basic form, you get a better idea of whether it is going to work or not. I think jumping into Photoshop too early can lead to more focus being placed on colours and effects rather than the actual idea.

Moodboards

Moodboards are great guides for a brief becuase they stop you going too far off from where you need to be. This goes back to what I said earlier about becoming saturdated with ideas. It can be quite easy to get carried away and lose sight of what is really appropriate; moodboards are a nice visual reminder of where you need to be.

Having a process

Processes are probably one of the most important aspects in design and they don’t have to limit your creativity. Having a process means you have all of the key elements you need in place. For example, when we design websites, we create tone of voice boards, site maps, work out what type of content will be going on the site – video, plain text, images etc. Once we have this information we start to create wireframes. All of these steps ensure we have really thought about the funcationality of the site. After we have got this right we move onto the design, colours schemes, imagery and typography. Working in this way means we don’t leave anything out and we have a site that works the way it needs to as well as looking great.

What are your tips for creative block?