Inspiration For Designers
As a designer, I often look for inspiration on Dribbble to give me ideas for design projects. If something grabs my attention, I usually save it to a folder on my computer, but as time went on this folder grew larger and it started to become a pain to go through thousands of images. That’s when I had the idea to create a collection of my favourite inspiration and post it on Instagram, it would be easier to find plus it would allow myself to share inspiration with other designers, that’s when Inspiration For Designers was created. After almost a year of being on Instagram, the account quickly grew to over 50,000 followers and that’s when I had a new idea to expand Inspiration For Designers into a website that shows a growing collection of handpicked inspiration, high quality resources and design articles to help motivate and inspire designers for their next project.
The Design Process
While looking at several websites that share design resources and articles, I noticed that a lot of them put too much focus on advertisements or their own premium content which distracted the user from what they were originally trying to look for. This became an issue for me personally, sometimes you have to navigate around all the advertisements until you found what you were looking for just to find out that it’s actually paid content and not free like the majority of the other content. I wanted to solve this issue and create a website that only focused on the content to help inspire designers for their next project, but if they were curious they still had the opportunity to check out the advertisements and premium content.
Website Style Guide
I wanted to create an experience that helped motivate and inspire designers for their next project. So using a cool colour palette like blue and gray, along with a sans serif typeface helps provide a modern look and feel that would blend perfectly with the projects that designers usually work on.
Inspiration Preview
I originally wanted to go with a modular design approach using a card style with shadows but then I decided to go with a clean and minimal design putting all the focus on the amazing design work along with having important information such as the title, author and categories.
The Outcome
The goal of the website is to help motivate and inspire designers for their next project by showcasing unique designs along with high quality resources and articles. But before thinking about the design, I knew that I had to manage a lot of content, so I decided to organize it into a simple layout using similar elements across the website making everything look and feel consistent while still being able to separate each content type like inspiration, freebies and articles. The user experience is really important and that’s why there are certain things across the website to help improve upon that, like showing popular inspiration categories on the homepage. But I also wanted to include some advertisement area for products and services that I personally think would provide great value to designers. The placement of the ads had to be subtle like in a sidebar, so they didn’t take away focus from the main content while still blending with the overall design of the website.
