25 Web Design Inspiration Sources You Probably Didn’t Know About

You’ve got a lot on your plate when having to design a website – deadlines, creative briefs, current trends and many more details to consider. Cooking up a good design with the right ingredients is not always an easy task.
That’s why we’ve collected 25 amazing sources for web design inspiration, to help you freshen up your ideas. Hopefully, these examples will help you to take a step out of your own comfort zone of good old recipes for design and they will serve you as a starting point for mixing things up a little.
And let’s admit it – good designers copy, genius designers – steal.

Let’s move on to a list of not particularly well-known  sites for website design inspiration that deserve a look.

CSS Nectar

At CSS Nectar designers pay a fee to submit designs, demanding confidence. Another condition: the test of the experts working for CSS Nectar. Only the best of the best is curated and featured on their website.

This ensures inspiration from very high-quality work by professionals, proud of their work. The site has nice filters too, to help you narrow down your search.

Abduzeedo

Abduzeedo does not focus on web design particularly, but its daily updated galleries can be a great source of inspiration for your next design. Why not get inspired by Architecture, Photography or Print? Yes, we can see you nodding!

Product Pages

If you are into accidental discovery – this is a website to visit. The website has a feed-focused design, but still, you have the option for specific search. If you are about to design a marketing site, Product Pages is a great source of inspiration for presenting product screenshots, navigational systems (which work) and successful headlines.

Admire The Web

Great related content for your search and rich categorization are just some of the things we enjoy about Admire The Web. We recommend using the tag cloud as well – it will naturally lead you to what you’re looking for eventually!

Unmatched Style

Very clean, easy to navigate website – it has everything you need – categories, search box, tagging and colors. If you have the time, read some of the descriptions/comments of the projects – it is always a plus to get extra points of view on a design.

The Best Designs

What we love about this source for web design inspiration are the large previews, plus the quick links to details for the website, the designer and the option to pin designs you like with a single click.

Hey Design

Small articles devoted to diverse topics related to web design. Easy to scroll through the articles and explore work from famous design gurus and/or the news from the UI/UX world.

SiteSee

Browse through different inspirational web design collections and create your own gallery. Share it with your colleagues, clients and friends. SiteSee also has some unconventional and unexpected collections/categories, such as “Pink Backgrounds/ Because nothing is cooler than a pink website”. They just know how to grab your attention!

365 Awesome Designers

Ambitious project, where Florian Diaconu posts a portfolio of one designer per day, the whole year. If you are into exploring the style of colleagues of yours- you’ve came to the right place. You can search back to 2012 and explore all the designers listed from previous years.

Template Monster

Although template designs might seem generic, they still can be appreciated for the great architecture and knowing what works best. Why not use the experience, research and tests of others to your advantage and for your next website design inspiration?

Huge galleries for web design inspiration, not that well known – check! Now let’s see several websites, which are a bit more specialized.

Trendy Google Fonts Combos

Typography is one of the most crucial parts of any design. Although there are some fundamental rules to follow, and a designer must trust his/her own instincts and experience, this site saves a lot of time on experimentation. It is basically matchmaker of good fonts. You just enjoy and tweak!

Color Lisa

Sometimes picking a color scheme can be a tedious task and an attractive color scheme rarely comes easily in the process. Of course, there are many useful tools for choosing a color scheme. What we offer is one more cool way of picking a color scheme – by browsing through color schemes of art masterpieces. How cool is that? Maybe that’s what is hidden behind Color Lisa’s smile. Excuse us – Mona Lisa’s.

Landingfolio – Landing Page Inspiration

Nice previews of whole landing pages of websites. Perfect for getting an overall idea of the organization and the design with one simple glance. Also saves time from clicking and opening actual websites, in order to explore their whole content.

Flat Inspire

There are many design trends and new ones emerging in 2017, but one of the biggest that remains is flat design. Flat Inspires is showcase of beautiful representatives of this style. Wondering if other websites will also dedicate galleries to particular styles? It would be kind of nice!

Code My UI

Can’t stop looking at the attention-grabbing video previews of smart and beautiful UI tricks and effects. Have to see it for yourself. It is striking how dynamic an experience with a website can be. Surely, a great website design inspiration for your future projects.

UI Parade

One more great source for user interface design inspiration. It will boost your creativity across different categories such as icon design, forms, buttons, scrollers, etc.

Beta List

The place to explore upcoming internet startups. If you are a startup founder, it is a website where you can share your project with the world and get early user’s feedback.

The Great Discontent

Many designers get inspiration from projects, thoughts, interviews and learning what other experts do in the field. This website offers you THAT kind of inspiration for your future designs – interviews with professionals, talking about projects and struggles, inspiration and behind-the-scenes of their masterpieces.

A List Apart

Another great source for website design inspiration comes from articles. Picasso once said, that you have to know the rules, in order to break them. Following this line of thought, the articles here are full of web design topics to educate and inspire. Bottom line, preparation for creating a design is as important as the actual process of designing!

Brutalist Websites

If other sources of web design inspiration can feel like a breath of fresh air and are extremely visually pleasing, well, most of the designs at Brutalist Websites feel like a punch in the face. If you are looking for bold and provocative design, the site is worth checking out. We can confidently attach the “out of the box” label to its identity.

French Design Index

Of course you can filter categories by country at different website design galleries, but why not also check how The French do it at French Design Index? Quality is the pivot here.

Finishing off with a checklist of the famous web design inspiration sources

Probably the most popular web design inspiration source right now is:

Awwwards

Awwwards is where designers can submit their work, get feedback, recognition and get noticed. The award system is well respected and they are constantly pushing the borders of quality and originality. When a project is judged, not only the design, but also the usability and the content are taken into account. Some of the web design’s BEST are jurers for submissions, such as Timothy Noah.

It’s a great place to browse and explore what the standards in the industry are and to aim for that level yourself!

Behance – Discover Web Design

Behance is one of the largest communities for creatives, part of the Adobe family. Although the curating factor is not as strong as for Awwwards, there is a large community appreciating the uploaded projects. You can easily filter your search and see, for example, what is most liked for the last month, in Melbourne.

This is particularly useful if you are about to create a design for specific auditory or local business. Although quality might vary, you can easily orientate yourself towards the goal – just look at the numbers of appreciations.

siteInspire

Huge library of over 5,744 websites, which you can filter with an extensive tagging system.

There is also a directory, where studios and designers, who have proved to be excellent in their work, submit multiple projects. By looking at their profile, you get a pretty good idea of their unique style and approach to design. You can see which industries they design for the most, and how the designers’ style corresponds to the clients’ briefs.

Best Website Gallery

Run by David Hellmann, the project started back in 2008 as a personal inspiration gallery. He is a self-taught award-winning Digital Art Director, Designer and Director. The websites featured in his project are more than 2,000 now, including both portfolio websites and agency websites. It is particularly good resource for color website design inspiration.

Designspiration

The website is like Pinterest for designers. It does not focus on a particular form of design and it can take hours to explore the community-curated feed, but there is a really cool color filter to experiment with. In our opinion – great for a brainstorming process for your design and to try and create a certain feel to it.

Pinterest

There is hardly any other platform, allowing you to save visual content for your reference, from nearly any place of the web. Users, businesses and customers save (“pin”) content from various sources to visual boards to use them as inspiration later in the process. It gives you the unique opportunity to browse through visuals, using extensive tagging, to find things, you’d have probably never succeeded through usual web search. Everyone is pinning. And by the likes of the pins, you can see what is most appealing to the audience.

Web Design Inspiration

Constantly updated gallery of web design inspiration. There is a section for curated, hand-picked designs and also various filters to help you with your search.

By clicking on a preview of a design you like, you get a nice description of the colors used in it, the industry and the style. Plus, you get similar results for further exploration.

Dribbble

Large community for designers – browse through various website designers’ portfolios and have a sneak inside their creative process, diverse clients and companies they work for. One of the coolest things is, that many designers make “redesign” mock-ups for companies they love. Great way to get inspired by honoring an existing design whilst bringing a new perspective to it.

 

That’s the end of our list of a selection of web design inspiration sources, we hope it will be useful for your design endeavors. We’d be thrilled to hear your feedback on these and to add something up to the list. Looking forward!

Cheers,

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