Last night I dreamt of a unique color combination. The day before I analyzed the typeface in a menu at a restaurant. On the way to work I questioned why a billboard caught my attention. The material in a woman's dress inspired an invitation idea that I jotted down in my sketch book for later. Yesterday I wondered why a jingle made me crave chewing gum. We are constantly absorbing advertising around us. It affects how we design, whether we realize it or not. I am constantly learning more about design through observation and brainstorming how I can implement something that caught my interest. Design isn't an 8 to 5 job. In fact most of my best ideas seem to happen at night, and sometimes when I least expect it. Once I dreamt about a project and basically woke up with a design solution. How do you bill that? ha ha ha. It is hard to assign a dollar amount to a project when your ideas are working themselves out around the clock. In college we referred to this as incubation time; the time that it takes an idea to incubate until that AH-HUH! moment. Inventors call it a flash of genius.