This is a great article on <i>why</i> designers should seek visual inspiration from pre-existing work and I know exactly one on <i>how</i> to do it:<p><a href="http://cameronmoll.com/archives/000016.html" rel="nofollow">http://cameronmoll.com/archives/000016.html</a><p>Cameron Moll calls it "nodes of inspiration" and this was highly influential on my budding young design career at the time. In essence, never rip off one interface entirely, instead you should rip off many elements from different sources and put them together in a seamless way.<p>It's a good way to build up the skills to make your own stuff from scratch and is the design equivalent of studying someone else's code.