Inspiration in and out of the ordinary

There are hundreds of places to find inspiration on and offline these days, but in the world of design being inspired can be one of the most important things. What is crucial is where you get inspiration from.

Personally I like to keep a continual eye on the world of design by reading blog posts, browsing galleries admiring product design and so on. There are other times when searching for inspiration needs to be specific to what you are doing.

You may love admiring the art work in comics and find that inspiring but if most of your work comes from building corporate websites you may need to start looking elsewhere. Andy Clarke gave a great talk (called Underpants Over My Trousers - <Audio [linked from the Vivabit Website]) about using the grid layout from the watchmen comics as a basis for a news site that he was working on, but this might be the only exception (though a site colored like Dr Manhattan might be pretty cool!).

I think that following trends too closely can be a dangerous thing, but it is a fine line. Certain types of site are expected to look a certain way and therefore it is important to be aware of other sites of the same type, but taking this too far can lead to the production of carbon copy sites.

A lot of sites talking about sources of inspiration will discuss why you shouldn’t rely on websites for inspiration, whilst others will be a list of web galleries. Both points of view are valid but it is a balance between these approaches that is important.

I thought that I would try and help with that balance by bringing you a few sources that I use for inspiration.

Web galleries

Web galleries are ubiquitous and often derided these days but there is certainly still a great deal of value to them. One of my personal favorites is Design Meltdown. I particularly like how it is divided into categories. This accepts that there are trends (and there always will be) and catalogs them. If you are making a restaurant site you can see a selection of what other sites are doing, you can look for things that are expected on sites of that type. So if a person is looking through 20 different restaurant websites they will not become confused because you have designed yours like a government site.

I know this sounds like I am suggesting you make your site generic but I do not think that is a good approach at all. Once you have seen what types of site have what in common you can start making yours stand out. The ideal effect would be to make the user go WOW! without making them have to think about how to use your site.

I guess this is in essence what makes a good designer but I think the balance gets lost discussing what trends to follow or how you should to avoid web galleries when looking for inspiration.

Another gallery I really like is Pattern Tap, this takes a different approach to many galleries as in concentrates on various parts of a web sites interface (buttons, contact forms etc). I think this really allows you to see usability best practices for specific parts of your design while avoiding over used trends on the whole site.

Erm… stuff galleries

Sorry I didn’t know what else to call them! There are a few sites I have come across that just seem to catalog all sorts of things. It is kind of the polar opposite to Pattern Tap as it gives you a broad overview of everything. The Awesomer is a great example of this. It is a collection of beautiful product design, incredible toys, stunning games and humorous t-shirts.

Will this help you design your next site? Possibility not. Will you see a robots eye that makes you think up a button for your latest app interface? It’s incredibly likely!

Another similar site is Ffffound. Ffffound is a site where users bookmark images that they have come across. Again you may not find anything directly useful but it will certainly encourage you to think outside of the box. In fact the photo at the top right now is a bird box made around the handle of an axe, how can something so great not make your day better and push you to think out of the ordinary.

Out and about

I am sure you could tell by the introduction to this post that I wasn’t just going to link a load of galleries!

Unfortunately I currently have a rubbish camera on my mobile phone but on my last one I had a pretty decent one, having it was a great way of keeping myself inspired. I know it sounds obvious but being able to take a photo of anything that catches your eye can be really inspiring. For a while I took way too many photos of taps in toilets (not sure I should have confessed that in public! There weren’t that many pics but anything more than one is weird).

I know, I know that sounds weird, but I just started noticing a few that were really different. They all had different shapes, different ways of handling how you use them, had a different color metal. This was a weird and short lived obsession, but it high lights that anyone can be inspired by anything, and capturing that even for a short period of time will keep you motivated to design new and wonderful things.

Other Media

I also have more normal hobbies than photographing bits of plumbing. I am a huge consumer of films and music. I watch and listen to all sorts, as a general rule, the weirder the better. I am sure there are countless articles about the ways in which films and music are inspiring.

One thing I find particularly interesting is when a film has consistency, when every last detail has been thought of to make the whole film look and feel like a single, tight piece of work. I find color to be a big part of this (see you knew this would be relevant to design somehow!).

A great example of this would be City of God. It’s in a bright, hot, dusty place and the whole film has a yellowy color, sometimes things almost look over exposed. It is designed to be that way and it brings the whole film together, so that every scene is pretty much identifiable as being from that film.

Another example of this would be Sleepy Hollow. All the colors are de-saturated till they almost look monochrome other than bits intended to stand out (mostly blood!). It really impresses me to see things like this, with so many disparate parts pulled together to be given a consistent feel.

I think here again there are lessons to take away in terms of design, even though they might not be that direct. Something in particular would be having consistency throughout out a page and throughout a site.

I am sure that, unless you are a genius like Jason Santa Maria, you have a common design throughout your site, but taking the example of the color in films it is possible that you could make sure everything just feels right within and throughout the site.

I am struggling to explain myself here because I am talking about an unquantifiable thing so I shall try to give you an example.

Dan Rubin gave a talk called “Designing User Interfaces: Details Make the Difference” [Audio and Slides - linked from the Vivabit website] where he discussed the benefits of having a pattern to your margin and padding widths. He suggested picking a number and sticking with. The example Dan used was based on a “rule of 6” where all his margins and padding were 6, 12 or 18 px. Again he talked about it giving everything an unquantifiable feeling of being tighter and more consistent.

When he demonstrated by taking an existing site and applying his rules to the design and compared the 2 you could see the difference it made. The re done version was vastly improved just from changing the margins and padding to be consistent.

Conclusion

I hope that this post has not been to long and rambling, but hopefully there will be something interesting, motivating or even inspirational in some of it. I hope that everyone has some little thing that regularly inspires them. It is important to both be aware of what the industry and to be able to find inspiration from out side to help the industry to develop.

Please let us know in the comments where you go to find inspiration, what web sites you visit, what silly little things do you photograph or collect.

James Abney-Hastings

James is a web designer from Cardiff in the United Kingdom. He blogs and displays his work at www.mancub.net and regularly talks nonsense and post to things he is inspired by on www.twitter.com/jahcub.