As a creative agency, we’re constantly on the lookout for inspiration, and we like to share our findings with each other. The whole studio did a quick creative exercise, and went out to capture an inspiring image. The rules: Capture inspiration in your life, excluding work that was done by someone else – i.e. well-known works of art or branded objects. Afterwards we shared our results at Hello.

Sharing pictures was just as much fun as taking them. The photos captured everything from tantalizing homegrown produce to found goods, from natural textures to the sun captured on “film,” from plant life to beach life. These glimpses into each person’s creative lens were in of themselves inspiring.

What inspires you?

One of the photos from our collection taken by Hajime, inspired by nature and vivid colors.

One surefire way to tell when people at the office are swamped is when they start breaking out the Lean Cuisines and Hot Pockets for lunch. Stress levels are high when our candy bin starts running low. It’s understandable and we all go there from time to time.

Last night we saw “What’s on Your Plate?” a documentary at the Hammer Museum that made us step back and think about those occasional unhealthy lunches. The documentary follows two eleven-year-old girls in New York City as they explore and question food activists, farmers, storekeepers, and their families about processed food everywhere, from markets to school cafeterias. One of the girls, Sadie, has a family history of high cholesterol, which she overcomes throughout their discoveries about food from government-subsidized farms versus small, locally grown farms.

The documentary hammers home the point that if we care about our health and the small farms that grow local, fresh food, we need to shop at Farmers Markets or order produce from organizations like Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) – which some of us at Hello do.

There are a good number of organic restaurants nearby that serve locally grown food, such as X’otik Kitchen and the Green Truck that’s only a phone call away. Every Tuesday there’s a Farmers Market in downtown Culver City. We enjoy the great produce and food selections there, but when projects pile up the visits to the Farmers Market dwindle. The film was a good reminder to be more mindful of what we put on our plate as well as the importance of local Farmers Markets – they provide healthy, natural food from local sources and promote community interaction, of which L.A. could always use more.

Today's CoverSpy feed on what New Yorkers are reading.

We follow CoverSpy on Twitter, a group who describes themselves as “a team of publishing nerds who hit the subways, streets, parks & bars to find out what New Yorkers are reading now.”

Most people get their reading list through recommendations. Friends, family, or even Oprah, share what they’ve read and liked, which people automatically add to the list of “books to read.” CoverSpy takes this to the next level and tweets book titles with brief stats on readers, including gender, age, physical attributes, and what type of transportation they were spotted reading.

With e-books like the Kindle and the new iPad that’s coming out this Saturday, readers can no longer cover spy. E-books make that virtually impossible. CoverSpy’s tweets on Kindle books currently read, “Title Unknown, Author Unknown (F, 20s, mehndi on hands, fuchsia scarf, Q train).”

For people who still like knowing what others are reading, we imagine an application will be developed that addresses this problem. Perhaps an app that motivates readers to share books they’re reading in real time. Or maybe something similar to Amazon’s buyer behavior for readers, a list that shows who have read which books, and what other books they enjoy. Whatever the case, sharing is a huge component of social media, and books are one of America’s oldest forms of sharing.

While standing in line for the restroom at CTIA Wireless, a person joked about whether we were going to check in and become mayor of the restroom. Location-based applications are this year’s trending topic, especially at events like SXSW and CTIA. To see which ones worked best, we experimented with Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Latitude, and Twitter’s new geotagging feature. Here are the results from our study:

Foursquare: If Yelp and Twitter merged and became a game, it would be Foursquare. Foursquare is centered on letting your friends know where you are, giving tips about that location and vice versa – most times this relates to restaurants. We like Foursquare because it gives incentive to check in, not just for virtual badges and “mayor” entitlement (title earned from checking into a place the most), but for real discounts. We’d say Foursquare works the best for social foodies and people constantly on the go who are looking for tips from their wide network of friends.

Gowalla: Gowalla is definitely the most aesthetically pleasing of the four. And unlike the rest, it functions mainly as a geocaching scavenger hunt game. Checking in requires the player to be in an exact location, not just anywhere within the proximity of the venue. The objective is to collect as many stamps in your passport as possible. Gowalla works best for gamers who are out and discovering new places, not sitting in their parent’s basement staring at the computer screen.

Google Latitude: Google latitude basically pinpoints you and your friends’ locations on Google maps. It’s cool to see your friends’ actual location on a map, but why would you need to? We suppose this app would work best for paranoid parents who need to know where their children are at all times.

Twitter: Although Twitter’s geotagging function is similar to Google latitude where the location of the user is pinpointed on a Google map, we find Twitter’s function more useful since it pairs a tweet with a location.  Avid tweeters who want location sharing without the fuss should stick with Twitter.

All four applications cater to different user personalities. We’d like to see Facebook integrate location sharing, and perhaps even make a game out of it. In reality, Facebook is the most accurate representation of our real friends, which is who we want to follow. The good news is, we hear they’re already working on it.