The Netflow

10 Places to get Design Inspiration..

To use an old adage… the Internet is huge. Millions of people use it as a place to get their thoughts out to the world, show off their ideas and generally try to help everyone else. However great this is when you have a few hours of down time to just browse around, It can be very easy when your looking for a bit of inspiration to get distracted by all of this white noise. So I’ve compiled a list of the sites that I go to first when I’m looking to read whats going on on the cutting edge of the industry and to get some design/devlopment inspiration. They’re also the place I go to first if I have a new project and want to see what’s interesting and get some ideas. These sites are useful to me for a whole range of reasons, more than I can go into here. Check each of them out and you should be able to see their benefits for projects both big and small.

1. Tutorial9 – An absolutely superb website. I use it primarily for Photoshop tutorials and don’t think I’ve come across a better website for this purpose. Regularly updated with posts and great tutorials, I go here first for subtle ideas that really shine to use on new projects. Written by David Leggett, it’s a very good resource for multimedia designers. Personal favorite : 5 Pixel Popping Techniques
2. Smashing Magazine – I really cannot give this website enough credit. Scarily helpful and useful, it is unbelievably good at what it does. So good in fact that I would pay to read what they write about… but lets not tell them that . Maintained by two legends – Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz, It is hard to leave this website once you’re there. More articles than you can shake a stick at, this website is one of the best on the Internet. Seriously. Personal favorite : Excellent Blog Designs
3. Fuel your Creativity – Along the same lines as smashing magazine except obviously not as big. Still has a great selection of articles though and can often turn up some real gems. Does some really good designer interviews aswell and these can be really interesting. Personal favorite : Typography is Sexy
4. The Blog at Elite By Design – A web design company that also runs a very nice blog. There is a 5 part series that I’m currently going through that really caught my attention and brought me to Brian’s (that’s all he refers to himself as…) site. Personal Favorite : Design articles to keep you motivated and follow the rest!
5. Sitepoint – An great resource for web developers and designers, Sitepoint covers everything from the business side of things, through to the purely design side of it. They also include a CSS and HTML reference section to their website that is very useful. Their news section tends to be quite a good read to and the forums are always busy. In fact I liked this website so much that I bought a couple of books from them which I can definitely recommend – “The Art and Science of CSS” and “The Principals of Beautiful Web Design“. Though as you can see from my website… I lack the creativeness to gain much from this book However it did taech me alot about typography and layout so I’d still recommend it.
6. Alistapart – One of the best resourses out there for web devlopers, it often leads the way on cutting edge techniques that are perfect to be your next subtle (but killer) addition to your website. Everyone knows the list apart sliding doors method of adding background images to lists.
7. Max Design – An Austrailian web design and development company, based in Sydney, they have also set themselves up as a bit of an authority on CSS, accessibility and Web Standards. What sends me to this site? The writers, Russ Weakley and Anna Gregg and an un canny ability to find some really good articles etc. on what we should be reading. Personal favorite: The “Light Reading” category always has something interesting to read.
8. 99 Designs – Unlikely as it seems to have a site dedicated to the buying and selling of logos and designs but you can learn alot from the very many talented people on here. It used to be the haunt of design students etc., a kind of place where they could earn some money on the side – however it tends to be very much dominated by graphic houses in the almost devloped (india, china… ) world that are able to do great work for that little bit less money. Still there’s alot to learn from these talented people.
9. CSS Zen Garden – I tend to find many of the designs here too graphic heavy. However there are a lot of very good ideas on display, and these can be very useful for any projects that you have. It’s a useful resource but I don’t feel you could really use any of the designs, however I don’t think that’s the point. It s more of a place where designers can show off what they can do. And there are really some out of this world designs in here.
10. Freelance Switch – What? Im recommending this for inspiration? Well… Yes. The purpose of the site is teach people how to make the switch to becoming a freelancer. And to help those who already are… and you can see where I’m going. They have some really good articles aimed at keeping freelancers out at the front on their industries so its for that reason that I put it in last here. It’s one of my places to go but it may not suit everyone!

Well, that’s it. When I have a new project coming up, the first thing I do is go scrapbook hunting. Then I trawl the above sites for things that I’d find useful and might be able to add to my site or add to an old site that I’m still maintaining. Let me know if I’m missing anything though…

Social Media...

Tags: Blog, Creativity, Css Zen Garden, Cutting Edge, Design Inspiration, Designer Interviews, Elite, Freelance, Gems, Legends, Max Design, Multimedia Designers, New Projects, Photoshop 5, Photoshop Tutorials, Subtle Ideas, Typography