Designing without inspiration is hard. Setting aside dedicated time at the start of a project to indulge in website design inspiration is both useful and, for lack of a better word, inspiring.
Back in college and in my early days as a web designer, my mentors would tell me to look to nature and architecture for inspiration. But as beautiful as nature and (some) architecture is, it didn’t tell me how to design the best form inputs or pop up modals.
Maybe I was just missing something, but I need actual website inspiration if I’m going to be designing a website. So here are the best places that you can go to find inspiration for your projects.
1. Land Book – for the best marketing websites
I’ve used Land Book for years. They consistently have high-quality websites and put a lot of effort into only selecting the very best to showcase. Traditionally Land Book was for landing page inspiration but it has evolved into a more diverse range of websites over the years.
2. Lapa.Ninja – for the best filtering options
Lapa.Ninja has similar stuff to Land Book but I really like its filtering options. Once you’ve chosen a brand colour for your website (blue, for example) you can come here and sort by all blue website and it gives you some really neat colour combinations.
You can also sort by style and business type which is infinitely useful.
3. Muzli – for passive, consistent inspiration
Muzli is a really nice browser extension for Chrome. When you open a new tab it’ll give you oodles of design inspiration. You can have it pull from any feeds you like (I have Land-book, Dribbble, ProductHunt, etc.) and get a daily dose of inspiration.
At times it can be a bit slow, and it also poses the risk of completely distracting you from what you’re working on but it’s also a fantastic way to keep your head in the game and passively find and save website design inspiration. Future you will thank you when you’re working on a project and you have a folder of amazing designs you’ve been collecting day to day.
4. Dribbble – for the smaller details in a design
Dribbble absolutely needs to be in this list. Despite its flaws (favouring beauty over usability, and the lack of any useful feedback) it’s still one of the best places to find inspiration.
I mostly use it for those little details like dropdowns or modals to get a few ideas on some different ways I can design some of the smaller features in a website.
As long as you keep usability front and centre in your mind, you can take inspiration from Dribbble without it affecting the experience.
5. SaaS Pages – for marketing website conversions
SaaS Pages is a great source of website inspiration if you’re designing a SaaS (Software as a Service) marketing website (obviously). They’ve collated all the important things like pricing pages, product pages, or landing pages so you can quickly compare the different types and find what’s going to work best for you.
So that’s it! Those are the top 5 places you can go to get website design inspiration. I’m always looking for more to add to this list so if you have any that you use and swear by, drop me a line and I’ll consider adding it!
