Web Design Inspiration: Where to Look For Ideas If You Are Stuck?

Working as a web designer requires a lot of creativity, skills, personal, and professional development. Those who perceive the world in a new way, find hidden patterns, make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and generate solutions will always remain competitive in our dynamic world. Today we will talk about web design inspiration.

The uncertainty with the question “How can I be more creative?” happens to everyone. This article will uncover the best website, app, and blog design examples for you. Additionally, our designers will share their tips and tricks too. 😉 Ready to get inspired?

This outlines the article for your convenience:

1. UX Studio designers share where they get inspiration
2. Best web design websites to boost your creativity
3. UX folio – The portfolio website to inspire your own website
4. Takeaways for designers – How to never run out of ideas

We at Ux studio have recently published an article about the top 10 website design trends such as typography and storytelling, animated graphics, gradient and overlapping effect, artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality as well as 3D graphics.

Keeping up-to-date with the latest trends will help inspire your next project, and this article will serve as a handy tool for those who need a few more tips and where to get great website design ideas.

UX Studio designers share where they get inspiration from

We at UX studio have a passion for the creation of new cool digital products. For this article, we have asked our beloved teammates to name their sources of inspiration and share their secrets of how to never run out of cool ideas. So, get ready to learn new things right now! 😎

Vitárius Bence

A self-taught designer raised on the internet, I'm either traveling, drinking coffee, or taking mediocre photos when I'm not pushing pixels. I rank my top inspiration places as Dribbble, Awwwards, Muzli, Instagram, and actual apps that I use on my phone.

Dribbble – The challenge comes in that most of the designs don’t represent reality there. But that also makes for a good thing. Many of them look pretty bold, and you can think of how you could apply them to a real project.

Instagram - I follow some designers and sometimes things appeal to me. In Instagram, I really like the more personal connection than just finding something random on Dribbble. In many cases, I can see the style of the designer I’m following. So, at least I can find something useful on Instagram.

My favorite Instagram designers who help me boost my creativity:

• Lubos Volkov
• Ales Nesetril
• Matt D. Smith
• Dann Petty

Martina Győrffy

I work as a designer, passionately ready to learn all the time. I love to travel and coffee. Also, I am crazy about dogs.

I usually take a look around the competitors of the product I’m working on. If smaller UI issues interest me, I usually look at Dribbble, Behance, and our other designers’ works.

I think Dribbble and Behance work well for UI ideas, but not for UX because usually, you can find beautiful but impractical ideas. However, competitors make for the most important ones because from them I can get a feeling for the best practices and how that industry works.

David Pasztor

I am the founder and the CEO of UX studio and UXfol.io. Moreover, I wrote a book about Product Design. I am also enthusiastic about self-managing teams, new technologies, and human-centered design.

For me, competitor research from the same industry provides a good source for inspiration and design. Direct competitors solve the same problems and with the same value proposition for the same target group. Look at your client’s direct competitors, look at how their websites or apps look, find good solutions or design details to learn from.

Remember! Competitor analysis doesn’t mean copying others' solutions, but rather finding the pros and cons of their products and making sure you go one step forward incorporating best practices for your website or app. After all, good designers get inspiration from others, but never copy them!

Or look at the companies with a similar business model to the one you are working with at this moment. For instance, you can check how the subscription model works on different websites in order to get ideas about UX/UI solutions for your project.

For color inspiration, I suggest Adobe Colour. This internet-based free application lets designers try out, create and save various color schemes, basically a simple way to capture inspiring color combinations.

Some other places to look for UI ideas:

• UXfol.io
• Behance
• Webbi
• Dribbble

Zelenka Sándor

First, when I burn out, I usually stand up and take a walk around the office, drink coffee/water, etc. I try to clear my mind and do something else for a few minutes.

Then, back at my desk, I try to get my sh… stuff together and start looking at design ideas on Behance. Works showcased there mostly focus on UI, extremely helpful when I try to create something unique. You can find a lot of options, from the web and mobile UI to product design… literally, you can find anything there.

If we’re talking about every kind of inspiration source, I like to connect UI to something else. I do some digging – I find websites, mobile apps, logos, whatever, and create something that gives all of them (including the UI project) a unique touch. When we were working on OTP Bank’s Simple mobile app, I kind of “invented” a card-like design (where I put UI elements on top of each other, like a pile of cards).

Gabor Lakner

I get inspiration from Instagram (“UI collector” profiles) in most cases or Behance.

They have a lot of good quality materials and solutions for different web design “problems” and the whole identity design :)

Instagram - I use it when I travel, it makes use and saving inspirations easy. I love this little one better than Behance, since you can see more posts in a shorter time. On Behance you should scroll the whole project, while on Instagram you can find just visuals.

Anna Máté

A UX/UI designer here at UX studio, I’m also a foodie, medium-level control freak, and beauty and lifestyle tip lover.

First, while I have my project in the prototype phase, I look for good UX solutions. We connect this with our competitor analysis and gathering best practices for our clients.

Second, I try to find some inspiration in the UI phase. I usually go to Pinterest, where I can organize my pins into boards (this comes in really useful because I can share it or work on it with others). Then I like to visit Dribbble; sometimes you can find really nice designs there. Although, I have to be careful which one just looks nice but doesn’t prove “smart” enough for real-life situations. Same with Uplabs: nice UIs smart ideas but not always realistic.

Moreover, I get newsletters on a weekly basis from these websites with the weekly highlights. Another great example – Pixelbuddha. When I need to download something like a font or a library, I add my email and it sends me newsletters.

I’ve gotten too lazy to unsubscribe from the websites 🙄 but sometimes I find interesting stuff there too. Instagram also provides a good place to find inspiration.

Best Web Design Websites to Boost Your Creativity

Each designer at UX studio has their own approach to where to get inspirational ideas and new, sometimes innovative, solutions to the projects. So, here is a list of popular and unconventional places for design inspiration. Creativity and ideas are unlimited there, everyone will be able to find a cool idea that might become a reality in the future.

Behance

A well-established online platform to showcase and discover creative designs. Let’s see how you can get inspired there.

• Best of Behance – Find the most popular images, videos, projects and visuals that were liked by thousands of people and ended by being featured on Behance.
• Curated Galleries – Shows off projects across fields such as graphic design, photography, illustration, interaction, motion, architecture, product design, fashion, advertising, fine arts, crafts, game design and sound.
• Creative Tools – Collection of works made with the help of various creative tools. The tab consists of a list of tools and a set of works designed with them.
• Schools & Organisations – Check, follow and join organizations engaged in designing new products and services. Visit their pages, check their galleries and design portfolios, get inspired to change the world to a better place. 💪

Dribbble

An online community platform for artists and designers to share their visuals, animations and creatives every single day. Dribbble encourages designers to upload and share their projects, so you can always find something new and interesting to get inspiration from.

We might not describe Dribbble as a good place for learning, but a lot of UX and UI designers with considerable experience socialize there.

Instagram

One of the most popular social media platforms, it intends to showcase and promote visual content only. Thus, it provides a great place for those who want to advertise their products and find their audience. Lying in bed late in the evening, you scroll the Instagram feed and stumble upon a beautiful post with a great design. You can already imagine yourself embedding some elements into your current project. Sounds familiar?

Our designers admit that Instagram is a handy tool for web ui inspiration. Here are some more Instagram channels for you to look at:

• UI / UX design patterns – Daily UI/UX inspiration provided by an Irish designer.
• UI / UX – Share UI/UX ideas every day.
• AWSM Colour on Instagram – Share new colour schemes every day.

Pinterest

The Pinterest platform deals with visuals, creativity and discovery. Since 2010 when the platform was launched, it has become a place to go for finding inspiration, interesting and funny images as well as the content for social media 😅

To help you find and pin the most interesting ideas and images, we have picked several great boards and designers to follow on Pinterest:

1. Mike Dew – Graphic designer Mike Dew from Philadelphia ranks as one of Pinterest’s most-followed pinners with 3.5 million fans. Wow! Incredible!
2. Daphne Torquato – Brazilian designer with bright and colorful dashboard collections about UX/UI design, package design, typography, logo, branding, etc. His profile mixes lots of things in a place where everyone can find something inspiring.
3. Colour Palette Ideas - A wide variety of color schemes and matches for graphic, web, product design, fashion, interior, UI etc.

Make sure to also check Pinterest dashboards with fewer followers. It may turn out that the quality, variety, and creativity of those pins go way beyond those popular dashboards everybody is following as a trend.

1. Daniel Nelson – Swedish graphic designer and developer Daniel Nelson has collected around 225,000 followers on Pinterest. The founder of popular design blog From Up North, covering graphic design, gig posters, street art, and even 80s design.
2. Tad Carpenter – Designer and illustrator. Tad Carpenter has over 80,000 followers on Pinterest. His boards range from retro pop themes to logos, classes design, type, vintage euphoria. If you’re looking for inspiration, it’s right here.
3. Xinkui Wang – A Chinese designer and developer from Beijing. If you are looking for mobile app design inspirations, then follow this pinner.

Awwwards

Online platform for digital design professionals from all over the world to find inspiration, share knowledge and experience, get connected with others, and improve skills. Awwwards goes beyond online presence, holding conferences in different cities all over the world: New York, Barcelona, Amsterdam, London, Paris, LA, etc. The goal is to unite the best agencies and thought leaders in the world of digital design.

Awwwards is constantly growing its web design collection. Every year it carefully pics and showcases the 365 best websites around the world. If you are looking for design inspiration sites, you know where to go. Find creative ideas that never end.

Template Monster

Once upon a time, a group of designers and developers met together with the ultimate goal to make the digital world easier to use and more beautiful. This is how Template Monster was born back in 2002.

Find all kinds of website designs at this marketplace, from art and culture to entertainment, games, and nightlife. Whatever your industry, you can choose from hundreds of design ideas.

Template Monster offers designers an endless look and feels for your inspiration. It categorizes templates into 18 groups with up to 10,000 design ideas in each. Besides, you can open everyone in a live demo mode, just like if you would open and scroll a live website online.

If you need to build a site or a web project, optimize it for search engines and do SEO writing, you know the industry of your client, but need more insights about how the website should look – browse Template Monster, it definitely has something to give your creativity a boost.

Muz.li

Design inspiration blog, news, and trends curated to your tastes. Discover innovative illustrations, design features, unique websites, photography projects and visual art as well as opinions and articles from design experts across the web and around the world.

On a weekly base Muzli publishes design inspiration articles, UI interactions, Inspiring case studies with bunch of UX/UI ideas for designers and solutions for designers.

Webdesign Inspiration

With Webdesign Inspiration, you will get fresh ideas every day to create better products. The website publishes hand-picked web design inspirations of different styles and industries from all over the world.

The interface makes it easy to navigate between the look and feels for desktop, mobile and tablet. Besides, the designs are categorized by website type (corporate, e-commerce, event, blog, mobile app, portfolio, product), by colour, by industry, by styles, giving you an opportunity to easily find your source of inspiration.

Best Website Gallery

A visual bookmark collection or a website gallery, whatever you call it, is the place that picks websites from all over the world and features them in one spot, so that more people would be able to find out about them and get inspiration for new projects.

You can browse through the whole collection, you can evaluate the website’s design and creativity, you can see the website’s score (based on the public rating), you can see how many people visited a particular site and liked it. Designers may find these small things valuable since they give an overview of people’s overall perception of the website.

Besides, you can also filter website cards by colour, content management system, style and framework.

Site Inspire

SiteInspire is a showcase of the web and interactive design collected from the site submission. It selects and features around 5 new websites every day on the home page. As a user, you will be able to browse through the whole collection, check the websites, see who designed them, give a credit to the website you like and add it to your collection. Eventually, you will be able to create your own inspirational collection of sites and designs that you like.

Codrops

Codrops is a web design and development blog that publishes articles, guidelines, how to’s, design collections about the latest trends, techniques and new possibilities.

Top Design Inspiration

TopDesignInspiration is a css and web design gallery daily updating its content from inspiring websites. Everything is published through social media every day, so you can stay creative and inspired with no effort.

UI movement

The major difference between UI movement and other design websites is that UI movement focuses on UI designs only. The content is provided by the community via submissions and curated by the website itself.

Each design element is assigned a tag and all the tags are available for you on the main screen of the home page for filtering and browsing. You can navigate through all designs, agency sites, solutions for article designs, buttons, calendars, charts and graphs, chats, chatbots, and commenting. These are probably the most popular tags for users to choose from. However, there are more than 50 tags available on UI movement, so that you can easily find design inspirations for whatever element you're interested in.

The website claims to have around 24,830 subscribers who are mainly designers, developers, and product people. If you decide to subscribe to the UI movement you will be getting 5 UI animations to your email box weekly.

UP labs

UP labs is a community of designers and developers who share their inspiration, feedback and resources with others. The website enables to browse and find inspiration on the daily showcases for Android, OS X, search for specific UI elements and solutions, share and sell design works (themes, templates, icons, etc.) UP labs shares around 24 new creative visuals on a daily basis.

Their homepage is an endless list of design ideas with the most up-to-date projects published at the top. Besides, you can filter the list by software, like Photoshop uploads, Sketch, Illustrator, Adobe XD, Figma, After Effects, Principle, Bootstrap, InVision Studio, HTML, Wordpress and 3DS Max. You can download design templates for your next project filtered by software.

UX folio - best portfolio website to inspire your own website

No matter what type of design you create, it is a must for every designer to have an online portfolio website, which would showcase your projects. You are able to present your work in a much better, clearer way than you would explain it in your CV. Take time to walk your reader through each step of your project and show how it solves a specific problem, and you’ll make a portfolio worth remembering.

You are ready to start working on your portfolio, but need inspiration on how to make it original, well structured, interesting to read, and beautiful? UXfolio is a way for you to tell your story laud. It is an online UX portfolio maker tool that helps to structure and visualize your case study in a fast way. With UX folio you can build and host one project at no cost. Besides, UX folio experts share a template to create an awesome design portfolio on your own. The website accommodates a showcase of best design stories and real-life case studies that will inspire you to build your own one day.

Takeaways for Designers - How to Never Run Out of Ideas

A new design project is always exciting. It requires flexibility and open-mindedness from designers. However, without a great design idea, it is difficult to amaze your client and prove your expertise.

Here is a list of websites and tactics used for finding design inspiration shared by professional UX/UI designers:

• Look at the competitors in the same niche to analyze their website design and solutions. Direct competitors solve the same problems, with the same value proposition for the same target group.
• Look at companies with similar business models. For instance, you can check how the subscription model works at different websites in order to get ideas about UX/UI solutions for your project.
• Get color match ideas at Adobe Color, AWSM Color on Instagram and Color Palette on Pinterest.
• Search for multiple creative solutions at Dribbble, Muzli, Instagram, Pinterest.
• Well-established online platforms: Behance, Awwwards, UX folio, Template Monster, Best Website Gallery, UI Movement, UP labs, Site Inspire, Webdesign Inspiration and Envato Elements, just to name a few.

Indeed, the sources for design inspiration are unlimited. However, you can also ace your web design skills by following these easy habits:

• Subscribe to several online web design platforms and start getting new inspirational ideas every day
• Follow creative pins, channels, designers on social media
• Bookmark findings that make you excited about design
• Create your own, unique collection of UX/UI ideas and solutions that might be applicable in the future

Let’s add more cool inspirational places to this article! Share your experience where you get fresh web design ideas to boost creativity.

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