Why Inspiration Playing a Critical Role in Web Design
Inspiration, or simply said, an attraction towards something, is a natural way to respond to things towards which we are attracted to or which gives a new perspective or dimension towards an idea which we have never explored. Inspiration gives us fresh ideas, new ways to explore something when we think that this cannot be improved more than this.
So, Inspiration clearly defines that there is no end to creativity and there is always a new way of looking at things which keeps us going and redefining the things with the latest trends. But, sometimes an inspiration has a chance of becoming a copy of the original which should be taken care of, as there is only a fine line of difference between getting inspired and the work finally being copied.
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Inspiration in Web Design
Inspiration is the source of creativity, which gives things a new identity, makes it creative, interesting and novel for a common man to a designer in his every day works.
Where Can We Get Inspiration?
There is no place to get inspired because each and everything changes with time, and inspires us in some or the other way. A child inspires us in many ways, there are no classes or tutorials to teach the way to get inspired, Don’t look out for places or persons to find out the inspiration, but simple things around you can be the greatest sources which you are looking out for. The greatest structure or biggest of inventions have always started with a small step, so don’t underestimate things, instead look out for something which may be hidden inside to kindle your creativity.
As said, a flower, rain, nature, paintings, books even movies can be a source of inspiration if we could admire its beauty. Inspiration of great artists, galleries of painters, exhibitions, games or even a holiday to any exotic location can kindle the creator inside you and bring out some of the greatest ideas. Not only from these external things but a good night’s sleep or a soothing music or a variety of food pleasing your appetite could really keep you going.
Does Inspiration Mean an End to Creativity?
Creativity is not a skill which is in born but it is a skill which is mastered and over the time it is the ability to take things in a different manner. So, a creator takes inspiration or observes many things around him and produces results in his own way.
Creativity does not mean to, create new things but giving a new dimension to things is also creativity. Painting is a general term but it has a lot of different ways of doing which gives a new dimension to painting, similarly inspiration always gives rise to creativity and paves a way to showcase things in a form which has not been explored.
What is Web Designing?
Web designing is not only about creating the layout and structure of a website but involves a lot of other things like the usability of the website which involves the factors like, how do the visitors like the site, do they visit the site often or do they just switch from the site, do they use it properly, and do the visitors register themselves with the site? It is the job of a web designer to identify the audience and goals of the website and make the sure the website is readable to the use and the visitor finds it user friendly.
Web designing is not only about designing a web page but involves the whole production or the process of a website i.e. right from planning to the production of the site, including the technical development, visual appeal, information structure and the networked delivery.
Role of Inspiration in Web Designing
Web designing has come a long way from its evolution till date. Design, itself is no longer restricted to a pattern but has got inspired from various fields and new designs are created each and every day and the credit goes to the web designer.
A web designer constantly works on new projects which demand a lot of creativity from him, so he starts hunting for unique or unusual designs which he tries to give a different look through his creativity. This hunt is Inspiration which is the most important aspect for his designs because he needs to be different from others, so web design galleries give him a new way of defining his own designs which itself can become an inspirational design. With the use of some of the inspirational designs, he improves himself or redefines himself and ends up with a fresh new design for his website.
These inspirational designs need not be the designs of other designers or anything in particular. Places around you could teach you a lot if you look at if from a different angle. Just observe the things and ideas surely flow.
Where Can We Get Web Design Inspirations?
Web designs from other designers in the form of web design galleries can be a great source of inspiration those galleries present the designs in a novel way which many give birth to another novel idea. Apart from these galleries there are a lot of other unusual ways like Visual effects, Digital paintings, Graphic designs and effects, 3 D visuals, Typography, Vector arts, Graffiti designs and even street paintings can be a wonderful source of inspiration.
Not only the galleries or other technical details but there are a lot of areas not related to web designing but could provide you with wonderful ideas which can be used in your design work. For e.g. Modern photography has seen a tremendous growth in itself by redefining the lighting, composition, applying effects like 3D, water colors, digital designs and more., Costume design can provide you great patterns, colors and beautiful designs which could work out as a background, even the package industry has transformed itself by innovative methods of packaging for food, beverages, laptop sleeves and a lot more.
Latest Trends in Web Designing
Changes are happening every second in all the fields and new trends are always seen in every field. Web designing has also seen constants developments and changes which happen every time. This time there is a constant growth in Social networking so many designs are based on them, apart from this even retro and vintage designs from the 1930’s and the 1950 have seen a redefinition and are back in the web designs with a new look.
Web designing has also seen a change in the form of designs from handmade sketches, headers, and logos, perspective changes, keeping the designs minimal and layouts from magazines. These are some of the trends which are followed and still the designs keep changing which needs to be constantly updated with the latest trends.
Not only the designs but also HTML and CSS have advanced in their versions, resources are freely available and new and powerful soft wares are created to produce the designs. Some of the designs inspired by the designers which have made a niche for themselves in 2010 are:
Print and Magazine Designs
Websites are created with a new design keeping the magazines as their cover because these designs have texts in columns and properly indented, they have a unique typography, grid structure and poster designs.
Typography
Designers are becoming more attentive towards the designs used for fonts such as using large fonts, line heights, leading which makes the website a legible one to read. They have been trying a variety in fonts such as bold typography for e-commerce sites and subtle headings for a pleasing look.
Hand Drawn Sketches and Illustrations
Instead of using heavy graphics with large text, a new design is also used in the form of hand drawn styles which give a personal touch to the overall site.
Horizontal Scrollbars
Websites are not only changing their designs but also changing their navigation which provides a distinct experience to the user. These navigation with horizontal scrollbars are used for websites which are used for portfolio and e-commerce websites.
Changing Icons
Icons, which hold a major place are also given a glossy and attractive look and are exclusively crafted for each type of websites for easier recognition.
Minimalism
The design industry not only focuses on heavy graphics and designs but is also looking forward to a new trend in the form of Minimal designs. These websites are created keeping the graphics and images to a minimum and focuses more on the details. White spaces and typography are used beautifully to convey the messages.
Checklist to Create Your Own Web Design.
Creating a web design involves a lot of tasks starting from the purpose of the website till its launch involves many processes like design, logo, usability of the site, SEO, marketing till the launch of the site. Here are some of the points which you should keep a track of, before launching your web design.
- Client and Target AudienceGet the preliminary information from the client as of what he needs, then go for a step-by-step development and prepare a list of activities to be included in your project plan.
- Design ChecklistThis is the second step where the focus goes in to the layout, colors, typography, navigation, GUI, checking the content quality, securing the PHP configuration and the things to be followed before debugging CSS.
- Usability CriteriaAfter the layout of your web design is finishes the most important part to be followed up is the Usability where tests and feedbacks are collected to ensure that the site is user-friendly and the visitors are properly using the site.
- SEONow, comes the most integral part for web site, the Search Engine Optimization. You should optimize your web site for search engines to generate good results and there are a lot of factors determining this like your goal, keywords, results from previous searches, compatibility with the browsers, visual design etc.
- MarketingThe marketing for your design is the next part where the goals should be neatly defined, your campaigning should be unique, is it optimized to the standards i.e. can the users share on social sites, embed the video, you should also track and analyze the growth of your campaign.
What Makes a Good Web Design?
A great web design should be visually pleasing, user friendly, should deliver the information in a proper way and should be usable by the visitors. For all these criteria to be satisfied a good web design should be able to judge it visitors. There are some key points which makes a good website such as,
- a. The users should not take a long time to think.
- b. The design of a website should be very simple and should not make the users impatient.
- c. You should have knowledge about the focus of the visitors, i.e they should think less and should have a better experience.
- d. Typography or the writing styles should be adjusted to the reader’s preferences i.e you should speak exactly to the point and avoid the long texts and exaggerated languages.
- e. The visible language in the site should involve 3 principles stated by Aaron Marcus which are
- The user should be provided with a clear and consistent structure
- He should be able to do his tasks with simplicity, clarity, distinctiveness and
- He should be able to perceive the most important elements.
- f. Finally the TETO or the Test Early, Test Often principle should be followed for a long running and successful web design because the usability tests provide crucial results for producing useful results which could be the design flaws or the problems which you would not have noticed.
What are the Necessary Qualities for a Web Designer?
The most important quality of a web designer is that, he should be skilled in different versions of Operating systems and browsers. He should produce a design which looks visually pleasing, should load quickly, and should be SEO friendly and should be display well on different browsers and Operating systems. The important things to look out in a Web designer are:
- Do they maintain a portfolio or can they explain their past works, do their designs look professional? Is it easy to use and navigate within the site he designed?
- What are their updates on the Content Management System? And How do they charge in case of updates to the site?
- How do they perform with the HTML and CSS techniques? They should be well versed with the design standards and create HTML that is efficient in all versions of the browsers.
- They should be able to provide you with ideas for your web design like Do you need Flash features, or E-commerce, or any other specialized needs etc., They should be able to identify and explain any features you may require in your design.
- Finally, after your design is creates, the performance of the website should be frequently checked, i.e. the site of the website should be fast, it should be usable, content of the website should be optimized with the search engines and do the graphics load properly?
How can Inspirations Help a Web Designer?
A web designer needs to constantly update himself to survive and shine in his industry. He needs to be knowledgeable about the latest trends and designs followed and should be able to satisfy his clients about the latest happenings in the design industry. That makes it very important for him to go through others works and observe any new thing he finds interesting and follow that. So, Inspiration is the most important thing for a designer to look and observe and follow it with his own ideas to create his own design.
Sources and Examples for Web Design Inspiration
Best Web Gallery
A gallery of websites based on Flash and CSS and the websites are promised to be quite creative, visually appealing and technically strong. Each gallery carries similar websites for a certain category.
CSSelite
CSSelite showcases more than 1000 award winning websites under different categories which can be used in your applications and websites.
The Best Designs
The best design website categorizes its gallery according to Flash, CSS and other design elements where the designs are also updated on a daily basis, and receives more than 300,000 page impressions on a monthly basis.
Best CSS gallery
This gallery is mainly about CSS gallery for the web masters which has a variety of topics from art, beauty, fashion, photography, shopping to the web hosting and WordPress.
Webcreme
Webcreme has more than 4000 designs in its place which can be viewed in categories of black, grey and green. This can be seen as the largest collection of designs.
Creattica
A gallery of inspirational designs and great images can be found here. You can also submit your designs here and rate others designs also. Once your work is accepted it ll be featured in the Creattica’s site.
CSS Remix
A showcase of CSS based best design websites which has many users of fan base which includes the best designers, freelanceers, developers etc.,
The WFA
Favorite Website Awards or FWA is a recognised award program and portal which has more than 100 million visitors and is the most visited award program as of August 2010.
Site inspire
Site inspire has a collection of more than 1845 websites categorised as style, theme and type which can be randomly viewed and also you can submit your best designs or other sited which you like. Get to know the comments from the experts and members of the design community.
Design Bombs
Design Bombs is also a gallery of various designs which are categorised under different groups like Automotive, blog design, dark, fashion, grunge, illustrations, light etc.,
Pattern Inspiration
Pattern Tap
Pattern Tap has a collection of all kinds of patterns which can inspire you. Created by Matthew Smith at Squared Eye and Chris Pollock at Simplified.
Pattern head
Created by John Rawsterene, a freelance designer, blogger, pattern designer, illustrator and an all round web lover has a collection of web design, pattern design and illustrations.
Color lovers
COLOURlovers boasts of a collection of more than 1 million user create seamless patterns for your projects. You can subscribe for the latest patterns of design your own seamless pattern and submit it.
Site Inspire Pattern
Designed and developed by Kulor, SiteInspire showcases the CSS gallery of the best designs in more than 25 categories and find other interesting stuff too.
Typography Inspiration
Typography Served
Features works related to Typography as the typeface design, lettering and illustrated works. This is a collection of category specific content from the Behance Network which serves the creative professionals.
Typeinspire
TypeInspire is created and owned by Vandelay website design which features works from the graphic designers and web designers which provides inspirations to create excellent typographic work of your own.
We Love Typography
we love typography makes you really love with the type, typography, lettering and signage. You can easily find your designs with the categories or also according to the colors.
Typesites
Typesites is a collection of sites with typographic designs which are showcased weekly that gives you more details than any normal showcase.
Typojungle
TypoJungle is maintained by Pixel jungle team which showcase international typographic projects along with the print and graphic designs, minimalism and modernism and is frequently updated through out a day.
Print and Poster Design Inspirtation
Exhibit Poster
Exhibit or Poster your poster designs which procures the best designs. This is created by Dash station, a design firm run by David & Ashley Yousling.
Flickr
Flickr is an online photo management site to store, share and organize your photos online. You can upload your photos, join some groups and make friends here.
deviantART
deviantArt is an online community for showcasing your works in various forms and to interact in a variety of ways. Started in 2000, this was created by Scott Jarkoff, Nagelo Sotira and Matt Stephens.
Behance Network
Behance Network helps in building your projects with text, image, audio or video using the Project Editor in the network. You can also embed your videos from Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and more. Promote yourself, get hires and connect with others easily and free of cost.
Logo Design Inspiration
Logofaves
A collection of inspirational logos which is showcased after filtering lots of designer portfolios and brings out the best designs.
Logofury
Updated constantly for some of the best and inspirational logo designs. An added feature is the collection of the handpicked logos which are placed in the ‘Featured Category’ which are the best of the logos.
Logolounge
Logolounge has a collection of a total of 137485 logos and still counting features logos in various categories and lets the visitors their own created logos.
Logo of the day
A high profile logo design award scheme which rewards the best professional logos and trademark designs where the logos are screened by a professional, practicing logo designer, Jacob Cass.
Stationary style
StationaryStyle is a project created by 350 Designs where there are a total of 1481 designs till now and with each new update, a post can feature upto 10 distinct views which pertains different features or layouts.
Icon Inspiration
Icopedia
Icopedia has a collection of more than 200 icon sets in different categories which gives you the information of the author and the license when clicked and also displays the related icons under the same category.
Icon dock
Has a collection of 108 icons in sizes of 48px, 64px, 128 px for Adobe CS4 applications and file extensions. The entire icon set is licensed under Creative Common 3.0 license.
Icon Archive
A collection of 31,600 high quality desktop & web icon sets under various categories from 261 icon authors. Icons can be used for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. Here you can submit your own icons too.
Icon shock
Huge collection of 949331 stock icons in 256 icon sets and an update of 3 new icon sets every week. Sizes available from 16 to 512 px, where there are more than 25 styles and for 25 different industries.
Color Scheme Inspiration
Color Combos
Color combos has color combination which is a tool with a library of pre selected combinations in Combo Library and also lets you generate your own as Combo Tester which could be used to test website color combinations.
Colors on the Web
Colors on the web presents you with many tools like the Color theory, Color Wheel, Color basics, color schemes and more with gives you a better knowledge of the color theory which can be used in your web design or can generate new ideas.
Color Scheme Designer
Color Scheme Designer generates color schemes with categories of mono, compliment, triad, tetrad, analogic and accented schemas. You can also export your generated HTML and CSS for a particular color scheme.
Color schemer
Color schemer offers to choose your colors either by entering a value in RGB or HEx and get the appropriate colors which you could lighten them or darken them. Or if you find this confusing you could also pick a color from the color chart there.
Daily Color Scheme
Generates one new color scheme daily in their homepage with attractive names which can be downloaded in including CSS, HTML, Photoshop etc.
Resource Link Worth Mentioning
Find Something Missing?
While compiling this list, it’s always a possibility that we missed some other great tips and resources. Feel free to share it with us.
Wow! Lots of great links here.. thanks.
This is great selection of sites for inspiration, bookmarked
Thanks Lots of great links here…
Wow this is great info, I read the whole article and m very glad to know about various tips related to web designing plus different links you provided, have bookmarked the page, thanks for sharing…
Superb links in here… good choice.. Great help
Hi,
Well Great work but I wants to add up that inspiration is good thing but copying any inspiration is very bad, so we must avoid it.
Good collection.Thanks for sharing