What’s the best remedy for "designer’s block"? Easy – visit design gallery websites to get you back in the creative groove. There are many wonderful sites out there specifically to help inspire designers, and here are just a handful of them.
Best Web Gallery features only the best XHTML and Flash designs you can find online. Best Web Gallery has a clean and easy-to-use interface, letting you preview a featured design when you hover over its image. Users can leave and read comments on the designs, giving you the opportunity to see what other people have to say about a particular site. Best Web Gallery is a project by Nick La, a highly talented freelance web designer, who also created Web Designer Wall and N.Design Studio.
Unmatched Style is a community dedicated to acknowledging beautiful CSS-based, web standards compliant web designs. People can rate and comment on the sites displayed here to help you narrow down worthwhile designs to check out. Unmatched Style also provides resource links, news, as well as interviews of top designers such as Roger Johansson, Jeff Croft, and Mark Boulton.
FAVUP currently has four gallery categories: Logos, Business Cards, Flash Websites, and CSS Websites. Each design furnishes a link to the designer - so if you like a particular design, you can also check out other works they’ve done that may not be featured on FAVUP.
The Adobe Design Center has a gallery section where you can find featured designers from a variety of fields. You’ll find Photoshop experts, illustrators, and web designers featured here. The Adobe Design Center also has tutorials and articles that you can read to find further design inspiration.
The FWA (Favorite Website Awards) is a showcase of excellent Flash designs. To be awarded the FWA is a great honor so you can be guaranteed to find first-class designs in its galleries. They also post articles and interviews on the website.
Patrick Haney created a Flickr set of web designs that quickly grew to include over 400+ designs and has reached over over 600,000+ views. Each design in the set comes with a brief description of the website. To learn more about the Web Design Inspiration set, check out his post on Think Tank.
LogoPond is a community where users can submit their designs to share and receive feedback from other members. Comments on the designs are a valuable resource, and most often you’ll find tips and suggestions by community members that can inspire you on your own logo design.
Most Inspired shares beautiful design work and also aggregates design gallery feeds in one page on their Gallery Feeds section. Some of the galleries on the feeds list are CSS Mania, Style Gala, cssimport, and InspirationKing. Most Inspired also lists links to blog posts that you may find useful.
Web Creme is a no-frills, simplistic gallery for web design inspiration. Each entry is tagged with their primary color palettes so that designers can quickly view designs that are in tune to what they’re currently searching for in terms of color theme.
DESIGNFLOOD.com collects unique, handpicked, well-designed websites to showcase in their gallery. Users can rate each design from a score of 1 through 9 (they believe that no website can achieve a perfect 10 and that there’s always room for improvement). DESIGNFLOOD.com features large screenshots so it’s easier to find the designs you might be looking for.
Where do you go for design inspiration?
Let everyone know which places you go to for inspiration - whether it’s a website, a book, a magazine, or a particular art gallery - share your thoughts in the comments section. When I’ve amassed enough input, I’d like to someday post about the readers’ sources of inspiration.
