For as long as I can remember, I have been collecting vintage ephemera. While this has sometimes proven incredibly impractical – lugging boxes full to the brim with various bits of paper up and down stairs for every house move – every time I visited a new city, I couldn’t help forging a connection to that place via its dustiest abodes. I would rifle through flea markets, worm my way through rickety bookshops in the back-end of nowhere, and hunt down bougie hipster cafes for their loyalty cards.

When I was 18, I found myself in the peculiar position of studying Archaeology and Anthropology. I guess it shouldn't have taken me by surprise. I’d applied for the course. I’d written my personal statement. I’d attended the interviews. But nevertheless, sometime around the end of November 2012 - perhaps just as I was being handed a bag of mud to rummage through in a lecture - I realised I might have just got this whole university thing a bit wrong. And, thanks to the recent nightmare of increased tuition fees, that wrong step sang to the tune of around £36,000 (plus interest).

Owing to a workshop I was attending and a sneaky thing called Annual Leave (big shout out to my two week holiday in February), I only had a day to cram in as many colours and coffees as an enthusiastic slow-walker like myself could muster. If you haven’t heard of On The Grid, I heartily recommend it. It’s a selection of local hotspots in various cities around the world, curated by local designers and creators – as such, it’s a sure-fire way to avoid spending your time circling the drain of tourist traps.

The Color Factory is billed as ‘an interactive exhibit that celebrates the discovery, serendipity and generosity of color’. Pretty standard stuff, then.

So hands up, I've nicked the title of this post from the site I've probably visited most out of all the internet in the world. Designspiration is seriously the absolute best Break In Case Of Emergency Hammer for immediate design needs, and I recommend you check it out when you get a sec. But when you've got longer than an hour to fix a logo, or more time than it takes to drink a cup of tea to nail a layout, where should you turn to spark a shiny new idea? Here I've listed my top six places where I find my nice brain thoughts occur; I’m hoping that writing these down will significantly reduce the time I spend staring at a blank artboard in Illustrator, and possibly help anyone who also occasionally finds themselves in a sinking boat full of Helvetica and standard swatch palettes.

I spend my time as a full-time designer at One tackling a fair few strange briefs. The variety of projects we get in is enormous, and a perk of working for a lovely small agency is that I often get a chance to dabble in all of them.

'Hunt' might not be the right word, because there's pretty much no hunting of design to be done in Berlin. Design isn't shy in this city, it's like a stray dog that follows you around and is very keen to be your pal. Which is a good job because I think if I'd have tried to seek out lovely design myself I may have got hypothermia.

I’ve been to the Edinburgh Fringe every August since 2012, and usually spend the week wandering around eating all the pastry, drinking all the coffee, and taking every flyer I’m given. The festival is such a great place to pick up some design inspiration that I always come home with a rucksack crammed to the brim with hundreds of pieces of paper, and enough ticket stubs to plaster the outside of my house.

Whether you’re putting on an energetic one-person play, informing people about how to house-train rabbits, or encouraging clicks on your article of the top ten names for Oasis tribute bands (Oas-ish comes in first in case you’re wondering), the job of design is to communicate. Design needs to carry a message. This message is made up of two equal parts: the visual and the words that accompany it. And just like a Brexit voter and your family Christmas dinner, whilst you can have one without the other, they’re much more likely to cause a scene when put together.