During my several decades in this business, I don’t recall clients requesting something that designers would consider trendy unless there was a good reason for doing so. Clients don’t keep up with or care about design trends unless they’re running a business that caters to trend-conscious customers. When I was in design school, a trendy solution was a negative attribute, not a positive one.
I’m not suggesting that designers keep their heads buried in the sand — it’s important to keep up with the times and not become dated. However, as PrintDriver mentioned, designers are supposed to lead, not follow others.
Are you sure the problem is really that you’ve exhausted your pool of creativity?
…I used to think this way, however what I’ve since realized, is that whenever I hit a roadblock it’s not actually that I’ve run out of creativity (which I don’t believe you can, by the way), it’s actually that I don’t have a clear idea of what solution should look like because I’m missing information from the brief.
I want you to imagine for a minute you’re not a graphic designer, but instead a furniture designer and you’re tasked with designing a chair - if this is all the information you’re given the number of potential designs are endless and it actually feels a little overwhelming because there are so many different styles and types of chairs, however if I said it needed to be a collapsable portable camping chair for boys between the ages of 3-6 that like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , the solution becomes a lot more obvious.
Design is more formulatic that I think a lot of people in our space would feel comfortable to admit, I hope this helps.
Different platforms are helpful to explore. It expands the learning horizon and creative mindset. Some of them are: Dribbble, Behance, Abduzeedo, Pinterest, siteInspire, Land-book, Commerce Cream, muzli and Designinspiration. as a designer we have to learn and boost our creativity everyday.
Let me share my proccess of inspiration.
I never use subfolders when I collect inspiration images. For example when I was doing my internship at the most famous branding agency of my area, we had this procedure: Let’s say we have to design a brand Identity for a restaurant. Then the boss asked me to visit pinterest, dribbble, behance etc and search for restaurants logos, typefaces, color palettes… Then I saved all these images in a “Restaurant Inspiration” Folder which we will use for future reference.
Now as a freelancer I find it quite restricting. Almost everyday I collect random images, designs, covers, posters, color palettes, photos or videos and save them in a specific folder. One folder, with no subfolders.
It might have over 3000 thousand images there now.
When I am assigned a project, I browse all these images and many times I get very good inspirations from something theoritically irrelevant. Then I make a seperate folder with the name of the project and copy there what I found interestign and could work.
Then after trial and error I end up to my final inspiration where I base on my final design.
Also I find very useful to have a font manager so I can preview the font with the desired text, before installing it. I don’t like how illustrator does it, but it’s a matter of preference.
- if this is all the information you’re given the number of potential designs are endless and it actually feels a little overwhelming because there are so many different styles and types of chairs, however if I said it needed to be a collapsable portable camping chair for boys between the ages of 3-6 that like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 
, the solution becomes a lot more obvious.