As designers one of the toughest challenges we face is creating new and unique designs. For some this may come easy (although I’m yet to find anyone who admits this, but never rule anything out!) but for me it can often be an uphill struggle. Sure, you may land a dream project where everything comes naturally, falls into place and your end result is a beautiful, original, and mind-blowingly drop dead gorgeous website, photograph, poster or whatever. However we have to be realistic. In my experience this just does not happen often, if at all. So what can we do?

In my previous article I discussed design research when planning a new site, but inspiration is a whole different ball game. By all means scour CSS galleries to your hearts content, and although it may keep you up to date with current trends the best that will happen is you mash together all these parts of websites you like and end up with something which is effectively a mess. A hybrid of nice design touches that combine to create a ‘Shiny’ or ‘Slick’ website at first may seem like a good idea, but the results often speak for themselves. Awful. It looks like a cat ate up 20 nice looking websites then threw up the results. Not a nice thought I know, SO STOP DOING IT!

I’m not innocent in all this. I have done it myself in the past, but no more. I have even created a CSS gallery or two in the past, but they are not the problem. It’s how they are USED that is the problem, but we’ll save that discussion for another day. Today is all about…

New places to get inspiration

As far as you’re concerned, for the duration of this article CSS galleries no longer exist. Cast them from your mind into the void where you put S-Club 7, Crazy Frog and the infamous world cup Vuvuzelas. They are dead to you now. So where are you going to get your inspiration from? ANYWHERE. That’s right, look around. Look at the shape of your monitor, the design elements that make it look shiny and nice. Make a cup of tea, look at the kettle. EVERYTHING you see everyday has been designed to serve a function, and to look good while doing it.

More and more lately when struggling for inspiration, I have found the best solution is to go for a walk. Around the house. Nothing? Walk round the block. Go to town and just look around. The cars, shop fronts, go into that charity shop on the high street and just look at what they have for sale – you never get variety in design quite like you do in a charity shop! It does not matter if your designing for print, for web or a cool new toy, inspiration can be drawn from anywhere. Lazy? Doesn’t matter, another great resource is deviant art but I shouldn’t need to tell you that! I look at deviant art daily, and I am bombarded with inspiration from the amazing artwork on there. (Hence the artist profiles on DesignStuffDaily!)

Inspiration can be drawn from the smallest element in a painting, the way a car has been dented, even by closing your eyes uber hard and looking at the colours and shapes that appear (although I would not do this for too long if I were you, can result in a headache…).

My challenge to you is this:

1. Go to google image search
2. Type in the first word you think of
3. Select an image
4. Design something based on it, anything, and see how good you feel for it

If you feel that good (which I know you will), post a link to the original image and what you designed from it in the comments below. You’ll be amazed with what you come up with and you’ll never look back.

Open your eyes people, don’t just prop them up with CSS galleries.