When Pablo Picasso was looking for an inspiration for his next work, he got fascinated by African art. 1
He used Dogon tribe masks as his inspiration and launched himself into the Cubist style that he is most 2
celebrated for. 3
As you can see, the resemblance is incredible. 4
His work was actually quite different before this period. Good inspiration can be equally transformational 5
for your work. 6
Let's say you're working on a project to design a website for a financial company. 7
Your first instinct might be, to go on Google and look for some examples for other finance websites. 8
But what you get here are data templates that look the same. 9
And there is nothing inspirational about that. 10
Why is Google a bad place to search for design inspiration? 11
Because Google isn't a website that curates good design work, 12
it has a very different purpose. And it searches and ranks websites in a way to show content that has 13
been there, 14
that has authority, that has been there for ages and has been visited by a lot of people. 15
And that's exact opposite of what you want in design inspiration. A keyword search for "finance website 16
inspiration" led me to an article that featured websites like this. In the article called it "Innovative 17
and Inspirational Website Designs". 18
No wonder it features such dated designs when the article is from 2016. 19
That's way too old for web design inspiration. 20
Add to the fact, that the mentioned websites have probably been built a couple of years prior to the 21
article. 22
Also, the fact that the author might not be a designer at all. And you get terrible website examples. 23
So many beginner designers make this mistake. 24
They look for web design inspiration in wrong places and they start mimicking very outdated or ugly 25
web design work. Using quality inspiration for your projects is going to set you off for a great design 26
results. 27
And I'm going to teach you my favorite places to find great and beautiful web design or another design 28
inspiration. One of them is dribbble.com, that's dribbble with 3 B's. Let's do that same finance 29
website search here. 30
Here are some of the results up close. 31
This is miles ahead of what we saw on Google. The design style, layout and colors look fresh and modern 32
here. Not 90's. Dribbble is basically designers show and tell. To contribute you have to be invited by an 33
existing member, so it sort of creates a level of checkpoint. To keep the bad work out. 34
The search algorithm is different from Google too. Here one of the sorting parameters is number of likes, 35
meaning how many designers have liked the work. 36
That's a better way to tell a good work, than a random finance blogger picking sites based on his taste. 37
Many of this work are just designers playing around. 38
That means that they haven't even been turned into real websites yet. 39
And that's an inspiration that is ahead of its time. 40
After a while, you start following designers that you like and build a very good personalized inspiration 41
for yourself. 42
You pick designers that have a same style that you like and fit your style. I also, use these two websites 43
to find my inspiration. 44
These sites curate live websites and landing pages. 45
If you don't know what a landing page is, it's a page on a website where a visitor 46
lands. This can be a home page of a website, or a special dedicated pages used for marketing. 47
I really like these sites because they are really well-curated, the screenshots are well displayed. And I'm 48
able to see the live website and check it out in more detail. There I can even see fonts that they 49
use, sizes, animations and interactions. And even see other pages of the site. 50
Really an excellent place to find inspiration. My third favorite place to look for inspiration is actually 51
Pinterest. 52
Although on Pinterest you have to be a little more cautious. 53
It's not curated content by designers. 54
So just like Google, you can get quite a bit of bad apples. But I look for inspiration on Pinterest for 55
one reason. They have some amazing search algorithm where whatever image you're looking for, 56
they can find similar styles with amazing accuracy. For example, you should find a design style that you 57
like. 58
Click on this icon. And look at that. Without even me specifying anything, it surfaced designs that are very 59
similar in style. 60
You see how the examples on the right have wavy, smooth, rounded shapes and edges. Especially in this particular 61
design, it's so similar in style, it's uncanny. 62
Here another example, for a totally different style. 63
This time no vibrant colors or rounded shapes, but more photography-heavy designs. 64
This is a very powerful tool for a designer. 65
A lot of times, I'll find a specific style that I want, but I'm not able to see other examples of the 66
same style, because I can't put them in words properly. By coming on Pinterest, 67
I can find many examples of the same style and collect several different examples for my inspiration. 68
Just like Picasso, one great but a bit advanced way to look for inspiration is to look for it outside 69
of the web design field. 70
For example, I was working on this project that was a charity Web site. And I wanted to build something 71
and design something premium and a bit different and not looking like other charity websites. Anywhere 72
I looked for inspiration, all I would get is this very common theme of sad looking African kids. That 73
just looks very cliché. 74
Sorry kids. 75
Instead, I went and looked for movie posters. Because movie posters are designed amazingly, they depict 76
a lot of drama and tension. 77
I found this poster of Sicario. And I really liked the style. I was doing this on Pinterest which gave 78
me more suggestions that look similar. 79
And then. Boom. This poster showed up. 80
This gave me more concrete ideas, that I could merge a photo of a person with something else. Just like 81
Peter Dinklage's face merging with the background scene. 82
This led me to create a hero section that looks nothing like a template charity site.