Web Design Inspiration

How to find web design inspiration in a creative black hole

Sooner or later, every web designer finds themselves staring at a blank photoshop window, slack jawed, with dribbling a definite option. You’ve been tasked with producing the ultimate in graphic web design layouts, and all you can come up with is an internal head scream.

Where can you find design inspiration?

In some very, very strange places. Next time the No.10 comes past, look at the side of the bus. A lot of people get paid a ludicrous amount of money for the billboard ad slapped up the side. Listen to them. Look at the typography, the way the advert screams at you to purchase/sign-up/sell your soul to Lucifer.

T-shirts - provided the owner spent more than a tenner on their apparel, take note of the designs. Don’t stare. And don’t do it surreptitiously, that just makes you look like a stalker.

Medicine packets. Stand in the supermarket, with an open box of ‘Man Spray - Gloss Paint for Male Pattern Baldness’. Pour over the way the medical warnings and side effects have been lovingly laid out in a typographical nirvana. I’m not saying you should be getting excited by this, but a little woody just proves you care about the subject.

Next time you’re in the doctors surgery for that weird growth, don’t ignore the lady mags. Pick up a copy of Hello, flick through and mentally record just how well That title hangs together with That background, all the time remembering not to get too interested in how Jordan feels about Peter. Do not, at any point, cross your legs.

Are you looking for grunge? What could possibly be more grungy than a ten year old billboard on some god forsaken part of an inner city? Photograph it. You don’t need to be David Bailey, you don’t need to assume the pose and look moody whilst you judge every angle and quality of light; this is design inspiration, snap it and stick it in a folder when you get home. Go down the skate park. Soak up the atmosphere, raise your eyebrows in bemused bafflement at skater lingo.

Get away from the computer. The first step for many a web designer is to fire up photoshop and try everything in the vain hope that it hangs together. Turn it off. Get a pencil and paper, fight the inevitable claw hand and sketch down some ideas.

Everything you see in life is potential design inspiration.

But keep away from the ‘Man Spray’ - that’s mine, and it’s needed.