Like UX and UI inspiration, web design inspiration is a must-have tool in a web designer’s toolbox. That said, finding the perfect web design inspirations isn’t always an easy task.
So, in today’s guide, we’ll help you find the muse you need to create visually compelling websites. Specifically, we’ll cover inspiration within and beyond the digital landscape.
How Do Web Designers Get Inspiration?
Naturally, you’re probably wondering, “How do web designers get inspiration?” The most obvious answer is that they find their inspiration from sites like Dribbble and Behance.
But it may surprise you to know that many things beyond the screen inspire web design. We’ve discussed some of these sources of inspiration below.
Architecture
Yes, any bridge, window, or building can prove a valuable source of inspiration for a web designer.
Many of the structures you pass by every day will likely have intriguing shapes, forms, lines, and even decorative flourishes. Even the most seemingly mundane structures can flaunt an engaging use of design rhythm (the repetition of visual elements).
When looking at the architecture around you, pay attention to the rigidity or fluidity of its form. This can help you establish a solid visual rhythm and evoke the right emotional impact within your designs.
You should also note the structure’s use of symmetry and texture. It must spark an idea about how you can add depth to your website.
Fashion
Fashion can be a great source of inspiration, thanks to its trending color palettes, textures, and patterns.
Consider looking into what’s trending in 2024 fashion. For example, according to Who What Wear, pale yellows and blues are incredibly popular this year. Knowing this, you can create a pastel color palette that resonates more effectively with your users.
You can also look into the popular patterns of modern fashion, like floral and harlequin patterns. Using patterns like these in your website’s headers or borders will create visual intrigue without compromising the user’s navigation.
Product Packaging
Of course, web designers don’t just concern themselves with a website’s visual appeal. They must also focus on creating logical, intuitive layouts that the user can navigate with ease.
That’s where taking inspiration from product packaging becomes critical. Many products are as small as they are great, meaning that a packaging designer must contend with spatial limitations.
To combat this problem, packaging designers must implement only the most essential content and employ a strong visual hierarchy. These are principles that you can implement in your designs, which will help users find desired content quickly.
Additionally, this sense of hierarchy also applies to a product package’s typography elements. Packaging designers must know how to manipulate a font’s size, weight, and width to emphasize the most essential information.
Again, this is a principle you can leverage when designing your website’s textual content.
Cultural Events
Contemplate finding inspiration in cultural events like India’s Diwali (the Festival of Lights) and Japan’s Hanami (the Cherry Blossom Festival).
Needless to say, you’ll find an abundance of bright colors, appealing patterns, and masterful artwork to inspire you. As inspirational as these things are, that’s not the whole reason why cultural events are great for web designers’ creativity.
Cultural events speak to celebration, remembrance, inclusion, and harmony. So, when a designer draws influence from the vibrant, celebratory nature of significant events, they aren’t just creating visual aesthetics. They are also creating designs that users resonate with on a deeper emotional level.
Respectfully emulating the magnificence of cultural events can help you elicit a powerful emotional response from your users.
Music
Artists, authors, dancers, and directors all take inspiration from music, and so can web designers.
You might think that, as a web designer, taking inspiration from music means finding ways to create pleasant sound effects. In actuality, you can leverage music to establish the appropriate mood for your digital designs.
For example, let’s say you were aiming to create an edgy design for a young, expressive target user base. Let’s also say you were listening to your favorite punk album to get into the right headspace.
Listening to that album could inspire you to use collage-style imagery, sans-serif, bold fonts, and dark color schemes. Not only is this visually interesting, but it will also help you accommodate your users’ interests more effectively.
Where To Find Web Design Inspiration Online
It’s time to look for inspiration a little closer to home. If you’re wondering where to find web design inspiration online, we have explored a few of the best inspirational websites.
Page Flows
If you want to see exceptional UX design examples and intuitive in-product user navigation, you go to the best. The best, of course, is Page Flows.
Page Flows documents screenshots and recordings that reveal how successful products tackle the art of user flows. Given how crucial user flows are to a web design’s structure, Page Flows is invaluable to any designer.
With Page Flows, you’ll learn how to adapt your web designs to specific flows like onboarding, signing up, and filtering.
If you’re working on web designs for different industries, you can still rely on Page Flows’ product library. This library contains flows that belong to industries such as biotechnology, AI, gaming, fashion, and more.
After all, great web design starts with exceptional user flows, and Page Flows hosts all the flow inspiration you need.
Inspiration and Pinterest go hand in hand, especially for web designers. On Pinterest, you can find millions of images that comprise a generous range of design trends, styles, and visual elements.
Given how many designers use Pinterest, it won’t be hard to find hand-picked collections that focus on specific design elements. Essentially, you have a wealth of color schemes, typography, icons, and information architectures ready for you to discover them.
What’s more, if you type “web design tutorials” into Pinterest, you’ll find handy images that explain a website’s ideal structure.
Designspiration
Designspiration is similar to Pinterest in nearly every way. The difference is that the resources on Designspiration’s platform relate solely to design.
In other words, looking at Designspiration’s Explore section is like finding a web design treasure trove. From 3D typography to abstract photography, Designspiration offers resources that will keep you up to date with modern design trends.
In addition to this, when you click on a web designer’s work, Designspiration will show the website’s color palette. So, if you see a color scheme you admire, Designspiration makes it very easy for you to emulate said scheme.
CSS Nectar
CSS Nectar’s gallery comprises top-of-the-line websites from world-class web designers. What’s so impressive about CSS Nectar is that you can peruse designs from a vast arsenal of industries.
You can even filter your searches by specific website features like parallax scrolling, flat design, and animations. In short, regardless of your brand’s aesthetic or industry, you can trust CSS Nectar to inspire you.
Another great thing about CSS Nectar is that it has a competitive element. The scores you see on a post relate to the website’s design, creativity, and coding. The challenge of making it to CSS Nectar’s Winners page contributes to the exceptional quality of the inspiration you’ll encounter.
Awwwards
If this isn’t your first time searching for web design inspiration, you’ve likely come across Awwwards.
With Awwwards, you can rely on a daily supply of creative, modern design inspiration. Awwwards’ content is so up to date, you can sift through the top sites of the year, month, and day!
What we love about Awwwards is its comprehensive filtering system. With a few simple clicks, you can find websites that belong to a specific tag, category, or country. You can even base your searches on the technologies and tools used during the design process.
Like CSS Nectar, Awwwards has its own scoring system. Only this time, a website’s design, content, creativity, and usability dictate its overall rating.
This feature is incredibly useful to a web designer. After all, if a website has poor usability ratings, you know not to use it as a source of inspiration.
Amazing Web Design: Homepage Inspiration
Before you finish reading, we’d like to inspire you with some real-world web design examples, too.
Below, you’ll find our top picks for the best web design homepage inspiration.
Evernote
Evernote stands out as a great example of homepage design because its visual design complements its value proposition.
Consider Evernote’s headline: “Tame your work, organize your life.” Then, look at the visual elements around it. A brief line of text, an eye-catching bright green CTA button, and a generous use of white space.
These visual elements speak to the simplicity and organization that Evernote promises to provide its users with.
Scrolling down slightly, you see images that show Evernote’s features in action on a laptop and phone screen. By demonstrating its responsiveness, Evernote immediately shows the user how it can accommodate their needs without needing any textual content.
Using imagery to show off its product’s most helpful features is a great way Evernote establishes credibility, too.
Pitch
Pitch is another example of a homepage with a compelling headline: “Win more deals. Pitch.” Alongside the magical purple color scheme and bold typography, Pitch’s headline speaks to the confidence behind its offerings.
Confidence is exactly what users expect from a business that will help them turn their ideas into winning presentations.
Underneath Pitch’s high-contrasting CTA, you’ll find videos that demonstrate how you can use Pitch to design and analyze your presentations.
What users take away from this is that Pitch can back up their claims about their offerings. As if that weren’t enough, Pitch also displays social proof, detailing how two million teams already trust its services.
You’ll also encounter an infinite flow of brands that leverage Pitch’s features, which adds a dynamic fluidity to its homepage. This small feature speaks to Pitch’s flexibility, being able to adapt to any team’s needs.
Tilda Publishing
The homepage of the Tilda Publishing website is creative, compelling, and beautifully minimalist. For a service that claims to help users create beautiful websites without the need for coding knowledge, this is perfect.
There are a few interesting things about this homepage, and the text underneath the headline is one of them.
Where many sites would use this space for social proof, Tilda’s Publishing uses it to advertise its pre-designed components. By doing this, the homepage reaffirms to the user that creating websites is effortless with Tilda Publishing.
Of course, users aren’t just creating any websites with Tilda Publishing; they are creating beautiful ones.
Demonstrating the website’s aesthetic value, users will immediately encounter an intriguing animation/illustration hybrid. This hybrid uses polka dot patterns and pastel colours, emulating modern design trends.
Overall, this minimalistic homepage correlates with Tilda Publishing’s values, which state that anyone can become a designer.
FAQ
Why is web design inspiration important?
For web designers, finding the right inspiration can lead to innovative design solutions that help them stand out among competitors. The right inspiration can also result in designers creating more user-centric or brand-defining products.
At which stage do you need to look for design inspiration?
Generally, it’s wise to seek out inspirational resources during the ideation stages of your design projects. By finding inspirational web designs early, you can come up with as many design solutions as possible, completely risk-free.
How do web designers stay inspired?
It’s likely that if you use the same source of inspiration for too long, your creativity will wane. To have a consistent supply of inspiration, you should leverage different resources like nature, architecture, art, and even social media.
Web Design Inspiration: See What Page Flows Has To Offer
Hopefully, by reading our guide, you can confidently embrace the endless amounts of inspiration around you.
The main thing to keep in mind is that your inspiration will shape the websites you create. This means that you should always consider your users and their needs as you gather your inspirational resources.
Keeping users at the forefront of the UX design process is something that Page Flows knows a lot about. Having read the previous sections of this guide, you know how valuable Page Flows is to a designer.
The great thing about Page Flows is that we have even more to offer. Not only do we collect desktop flows, but we also capture mobile-optimized flows. So, when you’re ready to practice responsive design, we’ll have your back there too!
Additionally, we document emails as we record valuable user flows from proven products. What this means for you is that you’ll know precisely how to engage with your users after your product’s release.
Overall, with Page Flows as your source of web design inspiration, you’ll create exceptional user journeys time after time.
Join Page Flows today to find the missing piece you need to complete your must-have collection of inspirational resources!
