CSSKarma

Finding Inspiration

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

From time to time we all hit design funks when inspiration is hard to find and everything we make seems to look like crap (at least I do). Having some solid sources you can fall back on while in a slump can be a great asset.

Most people I ask about inspiration will say something like "Inspiration is everywhere!" Which is true (like telling a sprinter to run faster… thanks coach), but not very helpful when you sitting in a cubical or office and you need to build a comp. And I know, when I’m sitting in a coffee shop relaxing, that last thing I want to do is look around for inspiration or wait for it to hit me.

For many years I’ve taken inspiration and creativity for granted, but when you go through a time where the ideas aren’t firing at you as fast as you’d like, you have to seek them out. Recently I’ve have to do that; so I thought I’d share my sources.

EDU Style

EDU Style is a new source I found. University sites usually have a pretty distinct style, as they convey a different message than most blogs or corporate sites. This is a great source for ideas.

Design Meltdown

Design Meltdown is a neat gallery run by Patrick McNeil. Thousands of sites to look through. Patrick McNeil gave a real good talk at FOWD08 about finding inspiration, you can view his presentation slides on SlideShare.

Daily Design Workout

Daily Design Workout is a very interesting project. Jonas Buntenbruch posts a new design every day, mostly images, but a very good source of daily inspiration.

Flickr 7days

Flickr 7days shows a random assortment of images that have been uploaded to Flickr in the last 7 days. It’s neat to look through, and every once in a while you’ll run into a cool picture you can grab some ideas from.

Twitter public timeline

Millions of people all over the world use Twitter every day, and a lot of them post links. Just go through the public timeline and click some of the links people post, check out the design; you never know what’ll be there.

OpenID site directory

The OpenID site directory is a fairly comprehensive list of all sites that integrate OpenID. It’s a massive list of web sites, why not click around?

Doing a Google search for "CSS Gallery" will turn up some good sites too (like cssmania and css beauty), but I think most us know about those, so I opted to leave most of them out of my list.

A neat source for typography inspiration is any magazine you can get your hands on. Magazines use so many different typographical styles that by just looking through a few different ones you can a ton of ideas to apply to your site(s).

Those are just a few things I’ve done to try and get out of a design slump, hopefully they’ll be helpful for you.

Where do you get YOUR inspiration?

Tags: design, inspiration, links
Posted in Life, Web Development | 8 Comments »