Gaining Project Inspiration?

Hi Treehouse community,

I have been working my way through the Front End track on Treehouse, and have found each course so far to be extremely informative - I wish I had joined years ago :) I come away from each course inspired and keen to explore my newly learnt knowledge; to put them to use in a project and retain the skills I've learnt. My concern is that I'm simply following the exercises and code challenges in the courses to the letter and not branching out on my own.

The issue I have is that I'm struggling for inspiration on projects to complete. I'm keen to start building up a portfolio of my own work (websites specifically) but am struggling to conceive fictitious businesses / services / ideas to build for. I'm not yet confident to approach 'real' businesses and complete dev work for them, but I'd like to test the water by putting some sites together, however without any assets (content / images / branding) or context of what I'm actually building the site for, I'm finding it tricky.

Let me know what you think - If anyone has any useful tips for coming up with new ideas for projects, I'd love to hear them :)