Creative Sounding Boards

I know I haven't posted in a while- a lot has happened.  The biggest thing right now is that me and my wife just bought a house, but the second right now is the next stage design we are building.

For the past few weeks I have been finding designs, tweaking my own, and building a team to help.  Today I designated for finding what lights I need.  Supposed to be a simple "just purchase two of these" lights, but it turned into a whole ordeal.

Which lights have the widest angle, which are the brightest, cheapest, accessible: all of these began to flood my mind.

What does a Creative do in times like these?
Go to their sounding board.

My sounding board consists reliably on about three people, but it also consists on whoever is around.  The key to a good sounding board is to have a mixture of creative people and non-creative people- I have found.

Today, I called a few of my fellow creatives, but used non-creatives and asked a simple question: "Do you like this? or This?"

Because something could look great to a fellow creative- but the general public might not see it that way, I mean, by definition creative people see things differently.
I don't ask my noncreative friends to try to come up with solutions for me, the same way they don't ask me to do math.  I use them to create a well rounded opinion on my ideas.

And that made today successful.

Who is in your creative sounding board?