So, you sit down to design a website, poster or whatever. Cup of coffee to your left, mouse in your right hand. You fire up Illustrator, and then right in front of you is a white vastness. You struggle to fill it with anything, but it doesn’t look right. Your initial scribbles aren’t transferring well to the screen. Dejected, your mind starts to fill with doubt. But fear not, for all you need is inspiration, and the internet is full of it.
With the amount of different galleries and showcases for design inspiration on the web growing by the day, we have decided to share our 10 favourite places with you.
1. Pixelsurgeon
http://www.pixelsurgeon.com/
There’s a myriad of news portals focusing around the world of design, but none are as good as Pixelsurgeon. The site proudly proclaims itself to be a “digest of the creative, strange and interesting from the internet, relayed to you by our hand-picked team of newsposters.” It’s the first site we look at each morning, as it pulls the best news from the design and development world. Pixelsurgeon keeps you up to date with all major software releases.
2. Brasil Inspired
http://www.brasilinspired.com
What started out as a pet project of Nando Costa in 2001, Brasil Inspired has metamorphosed itself into a platform for showcasing the best of Brazillian Web and Graphic Design. A daily news feed keeps thrusting talented designers into the public, each eith their own unique style. As you’d expect, designs are full of colour and life, but often with challenging angles to them.
3. Aisle One
http://www.aisleone.net/
An excellent little resource, Aisle One is “A blog about design, typography and everything else.” Updated on a daily basis, it has plenty of juicy finds which are enough to get design pulses racing. Well designed with good pictures and content, subscribe to the feed and be prepared to be inspired.
4. Form Fifty Five
http://www.formfiftyfive.com/
FormFiftyFive is the pet project of young designers Glenn Garriock and Jack Daly. It shares a similar kind of site style to Aisle One, but it has a much greater focus of Graphic Design and, especially so we note, Posters. Well worth a look in at, and a cheeky subscribe to a feed.
5. Designate Online
http://www.designateonline.com/discussions/
The internet is full of discussion boards for design, art and the like, but we here at Dirty Mouse really like this board. We love the simplistic style of it making it easy to read. Good content and a good community of people make this a great forum.
6. Web Design Inspiration (Flickr Photoset by Patrick Haney)
http://flickr.com/photos/splat/sets/981332/
We doff our caps to Patrick’s great Flickr collection of sites that he finds inspirational. Its a great use of Flickr, and some of the sites he manages to dig out are extraordinary. Updated on a regular basis and with full links and comments, its an ace flickr stream!
7. Smashing Magazine
http://www.smashingmagazine.com
“we smash you with the information, which will make your life easier. really.”
The site that loves to list. As do we. From the best wordpress themes to lists of the best free fonts around to all manner of juicy finds on the internet, every web savvy designer/developer should visit this site on a regular basis. It constantly has excellent, informative articles and tutorials. Information overload it may be, but absorb as much as you can, it’ll make your life easier!
8. One Page Folios
http://www.onepagefolios.com/
We love this site, as it is full of design talent from all over the world. The site was set up with the basic principle of showcasing the best in personal portfolios that adhered to one principle: their site consisted of one page. As a result, each link will fill your mind with inspiration as designers’ entire portfolios are presented to you in one bold scroll.
9. CSS Beauty
http://www.cssbeauty.com/
Well, we decided to include one CSS gallery. If we wanted, we could include 100, but we think that that can be a list for another day. For the time being we suggest you call in on CSS Beauty, as not only does it showcase some delicious sites, it also has an active community sharing tips and tricks, and a great and up-to-date news feed.
10. The Best Designs
http://www.thebestdesigns.com/
The best designs is a slightly different kind of showcase as it encourages both Flash and CSS additions. As a result, it has an eclectic mix of sites, which are continually being updated. The site also focuses on designers and agencies too, which is another reason why it stands out from the plethora of other showcase galleries.
11. Most Inspired
http://www.mostinspired.com/
“Most Inspired aggregates designs from all the popular css and design galleries.”
The site that saves you from visiting others. Most Inspired picks up on the feeds of other leading design showcases on the internet. What it lacks in visual design it makes up for in its wealth of links.
12. The Serif
http://www.serifpublishing.com/
“Your Daily Dose of Design Inspiration”
To conclude this list, we are including yet another Wordpress-based blog, but this one includes some spankingly good visuals and examples of work that will get your design brain into gear. You want inspiration? Go here.
