In-need of some design inspiration? Here are 14 websites to fuel your creativity and provide inspiration for any project. This collection includes logo, web, illustration and general design inspiration from galleries and collections across the web. After checking out some of these sites you’ll definitely want to get designing something new. Don’t forget to add your inspirational sites to the comments.
Carbon Made
Carbon Made has been around for quite a while now and has gathered pace with its user-base. Now featuring over 174,00 portfolios of work from 3D modeling to web design, this site is well worth a look and you may want to add some of your work to it.
Lemon Flip
A Slovakian adversing and design archive website with inspiration in the form of business cards, posters, logos, print items, and web design.
Web Design
CSS Mania
Around since 2004 CSS Mania has collected thousands of beautiful website designs for it’s gallery. View the latest updates on the homepage or click on Topics in the navigation bar to view by various categories or by country.
CSS Drive
Another CSS gallery with yet more inspirational designs. When hovering over a screenshot of a design, CSS Drive provides a hover box with the a colour scheme. In addition this site also has some useful web design tools including a CSS compressor.
CSS Elite
A very nicely designed CSS gallery that allows you to sort through designs by various categories including clean, blog, dark, colorful, unique, splah pages and more.
Minimalsites
A minimalist CSS gallery dedicated to showcasing minimalist website designs.
CSS Remix
A great gallery that allows you to skim through many designs at once to find something you are interested in.
Link Creme
Started in 2006, Link Creme showcases selected beautiful CSS and Flash sites.
Design Snack
Design Snack is a socially-powered web design showcase where the users vote for the best designs. Design Snack also provides filtering by CSS/HTML, Flash and by category of design e.g. Charity, Music etc.
General Inspiration
FFFFound!
FFFFound is an image bookmarking service that works similar to delicious but with images rather than websites.
Logo Design
Logo Pond
A community of logo designs submitted by users for your inspiration.
Logo Sauce
Another popular logo showcase. Logo sauce also provides competitions where users post a competition to design a logo from a set brief with a set amount of prize money (min $200). All competitions are reviewed by the sites editors.
Logo Design Love
A logo design blog with plenty of inspirational posts for logo design.
Illustration
Illypads
Illypads contains some amazing illustration work from artists around the globe. It may well inspire your next piece of design work! (Part of LogoPond)
In your experience, what tips do you have for the optimal web design? Smaller images? Larger width? Best ad placement? What keeps a user coming back to the site? (design wise). I am building a written content-based site that will allow users to submit their own content. I already have the code for it, but designing is really getting to me. I am more of a coder than a designer, so i am sort of stumped here. Any suggestions for a blog/stories design?.