Break free from designer block and point your browser to these inspirational websites that will make you rock your next project. From CSS and Flash, to furniture and imaginary characters – these are all you need to spark your work into a new level of awesomeness.
1. Deviant Art
An active online community for any artist, professional and amateur alike. The site has a great mix of work such as photography, graphic design, and even cosplay. Its user-friendly interface allows artists to not only submit work but derive comments and interact with other enthusiasts.
2. Threadless
Do you want to see people wear your graphic design? Take a cue from this community where users upload their designs to be voted on, printed, and sold! 10 designs are selected weekly so this site lets you be in the know which styles are well-received by the masses. Winners also receive commission and cash prizes, talk about inspiration!
3. From Europe
This site actually has a page called Inspiration, so click on that right away to get your creative juices flowing. Inside you’ll find the hottest tips from the field of design furniture, living, accessories and architecture. Get ready to be amazed with European innovations such as the tarantula tea light and the bended clock .
4. Mojizu
Believe it or not, this contemporary design community is for artists and for their characters. Remember how you love to doodle as a child? Then this is the place to improve your skills and get feedback from a large community of character lovers.
5. Kuler
It’s challenging to pick and mix colors when there are millions of combinations. With Kuler, a web-hosted application for generating color themes, you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.
6. Logo Sauce
One of this site’s mission is to inspire fantastic logo designs. They certainly live up to this by encouraging designers to expose their work, great and small to receive feedback and adoration.
7. The Little Chimp Society
This site is overflowing with news and updates in the realm of illustration. It’s a must bookmark portal for every website designer who wants to keep up with the latest sources of inspiration.
8. Most Inspired
Head straight to the Sites page for a fantastic one-stop-shop of inspiration on CSS based website design. Most Inspired not only offers eye candy but an entertaining blog and worthwhile tutorials too.
9. Colour Lovers
An international creative community that helps people discover their inner designer by providing a wealth of user created and shared color inspiration. The site also offers tools that make the creative process as simple as possible. No wonder there are now 745,446 COLOURlovers around the world!
10. The Best Designs
Grab your cup of inspiration from around the world with this website as it showcases only the most impressive designs from various locations: brochures, calendars, cards and web designs – everything is creatively mixed here! Aside from Flash and CSS, TBD has recently added a themes gallery which features some of the best WordPress Themes available.
Jennifer Moline writes for the PsPrint Blog about card printing, graphic design and small-business marketing.