Look no further — the following list is the perfect remedy for someone stuck-in-a-rut, bored of seeing the same designs over and over. Here are the most inspired, curated, and constantly updated websites around to help your creativity:
1. Awwwards
This is the place to find web design inspiration, “the awards for design, creativity, and innovation on the internet.” They feature jaw-dropping websites, a great search function with loads of filters, and conveniently categorize their content into sections like ‘Site of the Day’ and ‘Site of the Month,’ so you can easily incorporate the inspiration into your workflow.
2. The Design inspiration
I love this website because of its extremely creative selections, you never see cookie-cutter designs here. That’s a major plus if you need to see design solutions that are out of the box! The only (slight) drawback is the lack of an intricate search system — right now you can only filter designs by color.
3. siteInspire
This showcase shines through with its numerous filters, which allow you to look up inspiration in the exact field you need. They also display the featured sites in a nice grid system that on hover allows you to open up the website directly, bypassing any intermediate pages. Thumbs up for that.
4. CSS Winner
Pleasant design, big thumbnails, great content: similar to Awwwards, but without as many bells and whistles. My only gripe with this one is with the way you’re supposed to navigate through the entries – clicking on the thumbnail is not possible so you have to hover over the image and click on the relatively small title to go to into the details. Still, considering their curated gallery, it’s a top choice in my book.
5. The Best Designs
The Best Designs has been around for a very long time, since 2001, and it was one of the first web design inspiration sites I used back when I first got started in design. It features a clean design with awesome categories to help you filter out the results you want.
6. Pinterest
Pinterest is a great way of exploring new web design ideas, through their well-known grid system. A simple search will yield a seemingly infinite result of high quality website designs. So you’re able to very quickly browse through hundreds of them, and choose the ones you’re interested in to put in your own convenient pinboard, easily referenced whenever you’re feeling stuck. The main drawback is size – you don’t get to see the designs at 100% unless you visit the source.
7. Little Big Details
Great web designs of all kinds (not just landing pages, people) require a fantastic attention to detail, which is why Little Big Details showcases amazing user interfaces from all over the web. This site will come in handy when you’re designing your next form, dashboard or modal box — without which a website wouldn’t be complete.
8. Design Licks
This is a good source of design inspiration in a very nice package. It’s easy to open up the site directly and you have loads of categories to choose from. If only it were update more frequently! As it is, you get one new entry every other day or so.
9. Web Creme
Though its website is a bit dated and has no fancy features, web creme still deserves a place in my list because of its well-curated list and constant updates. To make the most of it, make sure you scroll click on the thumbnails so you open up the links in a new tab.
10. Flickr
Flickr is the king of thumbnails, and I’d say one of the best looking galleries out there. The presentation is great, but like Pinterest if you’re looking for the actual website in its live form, you’re going to have to drill down through some links to intermediate sites to get there.
That’s my list for best sources of inspiration for web designing purposes. I never let a week go by without visiting most of these sites. I allocate 30 minutes per session, and I consider it a great way to expand my creative horizons.
