19
Oct
25 Website Designs To Draw Inspiration From
Tweet One of the pet peeves of being a web designer is that you sometimes end up not feeling very creative and in need of inspiration. Of course there are thousands of CSS galleries out there, but we thought we could just go ahead and make our own list of great website designs. Hoping this will help you get your creative juices flowing!
Creattica Daily
Design Disease
Komodo Media
Down The Fox Hole
The Loria Family
Lewro
Blogsessive
Chris Spooner
Design Work Plan
Adii
GoMedia Zine
Stylized Web
Jeff Croft
MonoFactor
True Blue Titan
Armen Thomassian
Kreestal
Tim Ferriss
MatBlogg
Positive Space Blog
Matt Bango
Viget Inspire
Jeff Saramiento
Pearsonified
Playground Blues
Your Turn To Talk
So, which ones are your faves? And why? See ya in the comment section!
About the author:
Jon Phillips is the founder and owner of SpyreStudios and the co-founder of MediaLoot. Jon is a designer, developer, typography lover and musician.
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October 19th, 2008
Really a great list! I especially like Design Disease, nice colors and layout.
October 19th, 2008
I love Design Disease!
October 19th, 2008
@Chris @Umar: Thanks! Glad you liked the list guyz! Design Disease is a sick one! :)
October 19th, 2008
great blog designs you mean. websites are not just blogs and personal homepages
October 19th, 2008
@Ben: thanks for your comment Ben! Well, yes most of them are blogs, and… a blog is a website. :)
October 19th, 2008
Hey Jon…….thanks for the list man. I see you are back to rocking and rolling both online and offline. By the way, that design disease is awesome….thanks for the list man something to look at while on the computer (besides working) ;-)
October 19th, 2008
Stunning, How about posting teh templates?
Jiff
http://www.privacy-center.be.tc
October 19th, 2008
nice but many of them look like the same designer created them
October 19th, 2008
A few very elegant designs in there! :)
October 19th, 2008
Great designs…!
October 19th, 2008
Great designs…!
October 19th, 2008
Very Nice designs. My favorites are the ones that make the text portion the most readable without sacrificing a smooth design.
October 19th, 2008
Thank you guys for great compil. =)
Blogsessive is awesome…
And for blog I prefer Redoable design by Dean J Robinson..
October 19th, 2008
Absolutely amazing! Wow. So many talented designers and so many businesses with boring websites. These sites and beautiful yet easy to read. Thank you.
October 19th, 2008
Another one! http:/www.thatindiedude.com :)
October 19th, 2008
Honestly, most of these looks the same and are quite boring. They don’t even utilize much creativity. Anyone can piece together a structured look utilizing a color scheme as many of these have. Only a select few of about 3 to 4 actually seem to have any creativity in them, and that is mostly because of the artwork behind them. The rest are pretty much copies of each other and things that have been done countless times before. There is not much inspiration here, only a rehash of concepts which have already been explored time and time again in the web community.
October 19th, 2008
Jon, this is the second time you honor me with mentioning Blogsessive as a good design. This time, it Spyre Mag’s first “creative” article. Thank you! Coming from such a talented professional as you it means a lot!
Tex, thank you! I’m glad that my time invested in designing Blogsessive managed to attract such a good response and that users come to a blog they enjoy not only content wise.
October 19th, 2008
Trendy? Flavor of the week? I agree with Evan. Not much awesome here.
October 20th, 2008
Thanks a lot for all the great comments! It’s really appreciated! :)
@Evan, @critic: thanks for sharing your thoughts, though I don’t agree with you, it’s cool that you voice your opinions. I’d love to see designs that you guys did! :)
October 20th, 2008
Merci pour cet article !
October 20th, 2008
@Belleetsexy: Mais tout le plaisir est pour moi :)
October 20th, 2008
wow….really nice design
October 20th, 2008
Hi,
What about this nice design. Have a look.
http://www.mylittleuni.com/
Regards,
smartData
October 20th, 2008
Nice list, not feeling though that there is anything out there though.
http://www.doktored.com
October 20th, 2008
Pretty nice list, my favorite design though is http://www.avengex.com. The site is no longer maintained but I think the design is very inspirational.
October 20th, 2008
Thank you guys for presenting me. I am happy you like my design.
October 20th, 2008
Thanks a lot for featuring my blog, Jon! You make my day :)
October 20th, 2008
Thanks for the comments guyz! Keep ‘em coming! :)
@lewro, @kReEsTaL: you’re very welcome! Keep up the good work!
October 20th, 2008
Nice themes. It makes me jealous when I see this kind of nice themes and compare it with my own design.
October 20th, 2008
great list.. please create a list of the best “blue” websites if you get time!
October 20th, 2008
@navneet: Here’s a post on YouTheDesigner you might be interested in http://www.youthedesigner.com/.....e-designs/ :)
October 20th, 2008
Wow… amazing list….. thanks
October 20th, 2008
I really love the Loria Family blog site. It’s attractive, clean and with one look, gives an impression of depth (tons of content). Plus, Flash banners are always a plus in my book.
October 20th, 2008
I think most of these designs are overdone; there is too much emphasis on the bells and whistles and it’s hard to read the text because it’s small and surrounded by monkey-business.
October 20th, 2008
Matt Bango reminds me of some stuff we’ve done. Personally, I really like the work our Art Director did recently with Raven. I would call it minimal meets modern.
http://ravenseo.com/
October 20th, 2008
Komodo media gets my vote.
Nice collection!
October 20th, 2008
Thank you for choosing to feature my humble blog amongst these amazing sites!
October 20th, 2008
GoMedia Zine looks pretty fresh. I’m enjoying it.
Thanks for the list.
October 20th, 2008
Excellent inspiration.
October 20th, 2008
Think I like Lewro’s blog, but the display isn’t right and let’s my browser crash. Repeatedly. Am I the only one?
October 20th, 2008
I love to see truly great designers shine in this world-wide viewport called the interwebs. It is inspiring and just.
October 20th, 2008
With very few exceptions those sites all have the same basic layout. They are aesthetically very pleasing, but in terms of being 25 different designs I’d argue there’s about 12 designs there with another 13 great “themes” on them. Each one is very nice though.
October 20th, 2008
Great list! I’ll be using them for inspiration in my work in the near future. Just delicious’d this.
October 20th, 2008
GoMedia is the champ. The free vectors are amazing.
October 20th, 2008
Sas – I am sorry to hear that. Which browser are you using? I have not customized this version for IE6 but the other browsers should be fine. Let me know if you find time I will try to fix it.
Thanks!
Lewro
October 20th, 2008
Every last one of these websites look exactly alike. Same font and core design. Would of been nice to include some that actually were different from each other.
October 20th, 2008
Viget.com looks amazing, I love the concept. I’ve seen most sites on this list but not that one! Thanks.
October 20th, 2008
Some are cool and all, but I agree with an earlier commenter. Very nice for “bloggers”.
October 20th, 2008
Some of the sites are pretty, but none seem to be for a commercial purpose. A design of a website which is intended to make money needs to be planned and built around the advertising – in particular put the adverts in hot zones near the top and left, not way over in a bar on the right hand side.
In other words, these are art, not design – design is art for a purpose.
October 20th, 2008
gomedia is my favorite. cleveland represent :)
October 20th, 2008
I don’t want to be a downer, but this trend in web design is beginning to wear a little thin. Though these are head and shoulders above other sites stuck in the early nineties, I believe we need to move on stylistically.
These designs were kind of cool at one point, but now seem to provide visual filler where there is a lack of content. Too often certain decorative images and elements bear no relation to the actual subject matter of the site and exist just to be prettify the page.
There seems to be a bucking of the traditional tenet of visual design and that is to clearly communicate, not obfuscate.
Sorry, but that’s just an honest opinion.
October 20th, 2008
always glad to see such an impressive designs , thanks for this collection!
Keep on !
October 20th, 2008
Thanks for all the great comments everyone! :)
I got more posts lined up, hope you’re gonna like them!
October 20th, 2008
Thanks so much for featuring my site. I appreciate being listed with a bunch of great designers.
October 21st, 2008
Thank you very much for this post. These websites are very great sources of inspiration.
Jad Limcaco
Jad Graphics
562.235.7287
http://www.jadgraphics.net
October 21st, 2008
I liked all websites and they are really very well designed.
but i like MonoFactor most. :)
Thanks for this list.
October 21st, 2008
thanks for the mention!
really nice collection
October 22nd, 2008
i am bookmarking this page!!!
kudos, nice blog
October 24th, 2008
Great collection of sites here, well done!
October 26th, 2008
really nice designs!!!!
October 30th, 2008
Not bad a few I would disagree with. One of my site http://redchilli.com would of been good to mention as you are lacking some of the more simpler and stronger branded commercial site designs.
Nice one, Simon
April 5th, 2009
Another vote for for Go Media – i’m a frequent visitor to that website and its full of useful and interesting tricks and downloads. Everyone should check it out.
April 11th, 2009
Good sites for inspiration. Often looking at other sites will give you what you need to move forward.
April 19th, 2009
Great designs , I think design is 90% grabbing inspiration and regurgitating it with our own spin.
May 3rd, 2009
Nice collection, I agree that Design Disease in really original and nicely done!
June 4th, 2009
Great post – Some good designs here.
Generating inspiration from a number of sources will always help enhance your ideas. Template sites in particular showcase hundreds of websites, all of which will help contribute to your final design.
Any designer knows what a struggle it can be to create the perfect website. Trying to grab your audience’s attention can be quite a challenge but if you do sufficient research and source who your competition is, then you should be able to create a unique website that appeals to all.
June 24th, 2009
Awesome designs.. ;)
June 26th, 2009
This is a great list of inspirational websites. I appreciate the creativity and hard work it takes to put something truly unique together.
June 28th, 2009
Great collection but I would vote for Design Disease. :D
July 17th, 2009
Great list, I especially liked “Personified”. It’s simple but stands out well.
All of them are very unique and inspiring.
October 16th, 2009
I’m not sure about other Web Designers, but for myself, finding inspiration for a web design is always vital. I have spent far to many ours in photoshop staring at the screen waiting for that moment of inspiration to hit. Fantastic list of resources.
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