Places to Find Inspiration for Web Design

As a web designer, you’re probably looking for inspiration online - however, this might be limiting your horizons instead of expanding them.

Ask any web designer in your courses or schools where they got their inspiration from, and they're bound to pull up another website to show you. This isn’t all bad; to draw inspiration from your peers - after all, web design online is a medium unlike any other. However, if you limit yourself to only drawing your creative juices from other web designers, you risk falling into an unproductive cycle of copy cat. Here are a few offline ways to get your ideas flowing:

1. Photography
So often we focus on designing boxes, that we forget the physical space these digital places are meant to represent. Taking a few minutes to really look into the locations and feelings photographers have captured can move you more into a mindset of designing for people. Images have the ability to explain things without words, and with shrinking screen sizes and attention spans, it’s definitely a skill worth picking up.

2. Nature
Seriously, go outside. It doesn’t have to be for long. But even a short exposure to reality can push your designs into unexpected places. Even just people watching can lend inspiration - the book Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design, by Jane Fulton Suri and IDEO, did just that by compiling a thick tome of photographs of people using their environment ‘incorrectly’, but in a way that aided them in real-life usability. Remember that your designs start at a human level, and that to understand your users is to understand design.

3. Books
I know, I know - what does text have to offer someone seeking web design degrees or graphic design careers? A lot more than you might think. By excluding visual stimulus from the experience, books offer a unique and quickly disappearing medium that forces you to make pictures with your mind. Archaic, isn’t it? But as an artist, your mind is the best place to find artistic inspiration. Take a day to tear into some novels or poetry, and see what beautiful imagery your mind conjures up as it attempts to fill in the gaps left by the author’s words - you may just surprise yourself.