Nostalgia for Fun and Profit
One of my favorite assignments in design school involved going through my old class work and re-appropriating something I had done before into something new. I took old photographs and turned them into new album covers. A once-glorious illustration became a newly-glorious social poster. A really-quite-bad infographic became a really-quite-funny t-shirt.
The idea of reaching back into your near- or distant-past for inspiration can be taken beyond scrapping old projects for new raw materials. Case in point: I’m in the process of selling off everything I own, and my trusty old guitar is sitting in the middle of my living room (which has become Purgatory for my items in transition).