Each designer at UX studio has its 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 find. 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 an 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 into 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.
One of the most popular social media platforms, it intends to showcase and promote visual content only.
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 everyday.
- AWSM Colour on Instagram – Share new colour schemes every day.
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 up several great boards and designers to follow on Pinterest:
- Mike Dew – Graphic designer Mike Dew from Philadelphia ranks as one of Pinterest’s most-followed pinners with 3.5 million fans. Wow! Incredible!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. Thus 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.
All in all, if you need to build a site or a web project, 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 a 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 of desktop, mobile, and tablet. Besides, the designs are categorized by website type (corporate, e-commerce, event, blog, mobile app, portfolio, product), by color, 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 web site’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 color, 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.
Codrops
Codrops is a web design and development blog that publishes articles, guidelines, how to’s, design collections about the latest trends, and new technologies.
Top Design Inspiration
TopDesignInspiration is a frontend 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.
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.
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