5 Fantastic Design Inspiration Resources
The look and feel of your site is one of the most important aspects governing it’s success. A poor design can undermine great content, whilst a super sleek look can encourage stumblers to dig a little deeper. People stick around where they feel inspired.
But the problem we all face is where to begin. Where can we start to collate ideas and make them our own? In this list, I reveal some of my favourite resources for just finding inspiration, to begin a design and where better than to start than to develop your logo.
Adobe Kuler
Kuler is amazing, I mean really really amazing!! I have used colour selection tools in the past, but this one is really something special. Not only can you create your own palettes using colour theory standards or your own custom seperations. You can also save your palettes onto the cloud, great for multi-computer working or collaboration.
I think the real killer is its social aspect. You can see other users pallets and rate them. For someone who like me, who struggles for colour inspiration, this is an amazing feature. You can borrow colour schemes created by others, tweak them and include them in your design.
Moodstream
Moodstream, from Getty Images, is an unusual site, but one that can really unblock you in times of creative occlusion. You feed in your ‘mood’ using the sliders, or opt for one of the mood presets, and a hit refresh. Once the content is loaded you will be presented with a display of images, both moving and still along with an appropriate piece of music. Sit back, take it all in and let the inspiration take hold.
i find it can be a little repetitive (I wish they would add more images) but the principle is amazing, and has worked for me a few time. You can directly purchase the images and sounds, should you require, but often it is simply the idea it throws out of it’s randomness that inspires me, rather than the specific media it presents.
Ferry Halim’s Games
They say the easiest way to find what you are looking for is to stop looking, and I find this quite remarkable set of pick-up-and-play flash games truly enchanting. The artwork and music are remarkable and the game play is often thoroughly addictive. Just watch out it doesn’t distract you for too long!
A List Apart
This is a great article about the creative process which I think anyone interested enough to get this far down this post should read. It comes from the A List Apart blog, specifically from Mark Boulton and lists the formal process he goes through in his work when drumming out an idea with his colleagues. I think we can all take a little something from his approach, even those of us who don’t often find ourselves in a meeting dynamic.
This is just one good example from a whole host of great articles from A List Apart, I thoroughly recommend subscribing.
scrnshots.com
Design Galleries can be a really useful inspiration tool, and I think this one stand above a lot that I have seen. It encourages user uploading, commenting and rating of designs and lot’s of cool webby features like embedding syntax and a new wordpress plugin. Site’s like this can be really useful for freelancers who spend most of there time by themselves without colleagues to play critic for them. In this context, it can be nice just to have someone confirm or deny the quality of your latest design.
Well, that’s my top six. If anyone reading this has any others, please leave them in the comments.