Unusual Sources Of Inspiration For Your Web Design

If you know your company needs a website but have no inspiration on how that’s going to look, then a quality web design company will be able to make suggestions for you and help you to come up with a design that really works for your business and your needs.

While this is true though, it’s even more ideal if you are able to come to your web design company with some idea of what you want the end product to look like. This way you will feel you have more ownership over the result and it will be more in tune with the way you see your brand and how you want to project that brand to the world.

But how do you come up with inspiration? You can look at other websites for sure, but sometimes this just doesn’t spark that light bulb. In which case, it’s time to think outside the box!

Print Media

One place to look for inspiration when designing your site, is in print media. Web design has always taken a lot of cues from this format that immediately preceded it and you can still get a lot of ideas from perusing magazine covers in your local newsagents. Oftentimes, magazines are more creative with their design, which makes them a great source for inspiration.

It doesn’t have to stop at magazines either. You can get plenty of inspiration from book covers too, or even comic books.

Interior Design

Interior design actually has a lot in common with web design. Like a website, an interior design needs to be functional and practical, while having a pleasing initial impression on the eye and a color palette that works well. If you see a room or environment that you particularly like the looks of, then you might want to consider taking a few snapshots or looking at why the combination of angles and colors works.

Nature

Nature is also a great source of inspiration and particularly when it comes to color palettes. For whatever reason, the color combinations we tend to witness in nature just work and because they’re natural, they will create instantly-familiar feelings for your visitors.

You can thus learn from the colors you see in nature and adopt them into your own designs. Take photos and use a color picker to pick out the dominant tones that appear to work well together. There are also plenty of beautiful nature images online if you don’t live anywhere near sites of natural beauty.

Skeuomorphism

A skeuomorphism is a design that is intended to purposefully recall a real-world object. For instance, an app that changed your phone dialer into an old-fashioned rotary dialer would be an example of skeuomorphism. There are tons of great websites that rely on skeuomorphism for their design and when done well, they are not only clever, but are also effective in communicating the theme of that site. If you sell musical instruments for instance, then why not make your menu on the left hand column look like a fretboard?

Do you actually rely on unusual sources of inspiration for your web design that’s not mentioned here? Do share with us!