inspiration – Page 3

Friday Focus 09/19/08: Think Out of the Box

September 19, 2008 By Sophia Lucero

This week’s Friday Focus will inspire you to think out of the box. Get ready!

Designs of the Week

I like the use of the scattered black circles as the main feature of this design. Though I would suggest being able to distinguish the clickables over the non-clickables. Another good thing about this site is that they included an HTML-only format for those who don’t want the zaniness.

Technically, you can still make out boxes in the different areas of this design, but the graphics just break out of them. Minus points for using the <marquee> tag, but it somehow contributes to the quirkiness of the site.

The implementation of this look is just excellent. And it doesn’t take much to scatter all the images throughout the whole page. Inside it gets a little more organized, which is fine, but I wish the sticky tape was retained for more consistency.

Grunge is practically commonplace these days, but sites like these remind us it’s not just about the “dirt”, but how that dirt plays into the basic structure of a web page. It can eradicate the boxiness and make an impression at the same time.

Social Media Weekly

Design – 20 Creative and Inspiring Free Design Magazines
Another great source of inspiration: magazines. Grab a ton of them for free!

Programming – Understanding Disabilities when Designing a Website
Some very thoughtful tips on making sure your sites is friendly enough for users with disabilities.

Break Your Design Mold

December 20, 2007 By Thord Daniel Hedengren

Designers can easily get stuck in the same old tracks. Be it rounded corners (which I bashed on Wisdump by the way), gradients everywhere, or just an overall style that could do with some fresh input.

A friend of mine reminded me of trying to do different things design-wise, every now and then.

A friend of mine reminded me of trying to do different things design-wise, every now and then. I’ve been too absorbed by everything else, so I just haven’t pushed myself forward as a designer. To do that, you need time to experiment, and you need energy to put into it. Two things that doesn’t come a-plenty, I’m afraid.

So here’s a thought for all the designers out there. Break your own mold on your next project. Do it in a different way, even if it doesn’t turn out just right, you’re bound to pick something up along the process.

Here are some suggestions on things you could do to break your mold:

Rethink font usage. We all got our favorites, now try something different.
Web 2.0 i very fresh and clean. Well, screw it – let’s do something dark and musty! Or the other way around, if you usually do dark designs.
Are you a blog designer? Then change the composition of your next blog design. Do a one column theme (you know I like ’em), do something nifty with the sidebar, do a different navigation, just do something that isn’t so much Blog by You.
Change your use of images in your next design. Heavy users go light, and vice versa.
Use colors you normally wouldn’t! Try new blends and schemes. Or do it just in black and white, whatever differs from what you normally do.

Just a few pointers on the way, I know. What you can do to change your design mold is entirely up to you, and your style of course.

Me, I’ve already mapped out a design for a client, going with dark backgrounds and a powerful header/top, rather than the white fresh European thing I usually end up in. I’m confident it will turn out OK, I can see that already, and just by thinking along these lines I’ve come up with other things I want to try.

So go on, break your design mold. I dare you.

Help Picking the Right Color

November 13, 2007 By Thord Daniel Hedengren

Picking the right colors for a project can be hard. Sometimes you end up doing the same scale over and over again, overusing those easy blue and white with a touch of gray designs. So what do you do when you need inspiration for new color schemes? You could hunt the CSS galleries of course, looking at designs, but there are better ways.

Enter the huge amount of color schemers available online!

The First Stops

A great first stop when looking for new inspiration when it comes to colors, is COLOURlovers. It’s basically a blog about colors, with trends and votable palettes, and so on. This is where I would go first, if inspiration failed me. I just might for an upcoming project, actually…

Almost as cool is Adobe’s online service Kuler. It sports a way better design, tag clouds, and 24 508 color palettes to work from. There’s also a desktop application, using the AIR framework, if you want Kuler easily available. This is so much more than just a place to hunt for colors, developers can use the Kuler API and do a bunch of stuff, but for me and for now, it’s just a great place to scan for interesting color patterns.

Online Apps to the Rescue

Color Inspirator and ColorToy are two nice services. Both offer random color combinations, if you’re really thirsty for something new this might be the way to go. More fun than practical, perhaps, since you usually have an idea of what you’re after, but still. Fun stuff, and could be useful. It would be interesting to create a design, basing all the color choices on the randomness of online apps like these.

There are some other services as well. Color Palette Generator lets you upload an image, and it’ll generate a color palette based on it for you. Pretty cool, and could even be handy if you’ve got a header image you really want to use, but aren’t sure what colors the site you’re doing should have. Color Combinations lets you pull other websites colors, as well as offers lots of palettes arranged in color tags. Finally, GrayBit is a really cool service that lets you test the contrast of your chosen colors. Put in http://www.devlounge.net in their little form, press the Make it Gray button and BAM! There it is, acceptable contrast I’d say.

Devlounge, grayscale edition

Closing the Coloring Book

There’s ton more, of course, but hopefully this little article will help you out the next time your creative mind draws a blank when you need to choose the right colors. It sure reminded me, just by browsing these sites again, of how many cool color combinations there is out there.

Happy coloring!

Inspiration from Within School Walls

August 21, 2007 By Devlounge

It approaches. The humidity takes a slight drop for a few days, and you can feel a refreshing feeling in the air. The leaves on the trees are still green, but a small portion fall to the ground and dry up. August is drawing to a close and September is coming. Another school year is upon us.

Many, if not most of you are way beyond this point. But for me, my final year of high school looms just a few short weeks away. The last few weeks of summer always seem to play with you – you know as days go by you are getting closer and closer to the start of a new school year, which puts a damper on the “fun” the last couple weeks of summer should really be about. Time is quickly running out, and before you know it, the 10 weeks of summer have vanished.

As soon as the school doors bust open, my motivation to do much design work usually seems to slam shut. Especially early on, that first month always seems to be a motivational killer. School requires a major refocus of time and effort, meaning books and school work take the forefront and Photoshop begins to collect dust.

Up until last year, it was that very reason which usually led me to take very few clients over the course of a school year. I usually did most of my client work in the summer, and let it take the back seat once fall hit. But beginning in my junior year, the on and off periods flip flopped. Last year, I found myself gathering ideas all day long, in various forms, while sitting in the back of a classroom. Pens, pencils, and pads are good for a lot of things.

The truth is, you don’t need a fancy to do list application or Photoshop in front of you to get your ideas down and out there in the open. I spent a lot of time throughout last year using the back pages in notebooks to draw up ideas for new sites, client work, and just about anything else I could think of. I’d sketch out design concepts (including some of the ones that later became versions of Devlounge), and label different sections with numbers, including notes on what I planned to fill each section with and how I could get it to work. Then, whenever I got the chance, I’d go into Photoshop and create rough mockups of my sketches and save them, so that even if I didn’t end up putting them to use, I’d have the ideas stored up for future work or projects. It turned out to be a fairly productive method, which explains why I took more clients last year during my “busiest” year of high school.

So my advice to you high school or early college kids who are still trying to become the best designer possible – don’t let school get in the way of your creativity. Of course set your priorities in the right order, but when you have time for it and ideas come to you, write them down! Whether it’s with words or pictures, it can really help you learn by storing all your concepts somewhere you have easy access to them. Here’s what I recommend:

Extra Notebook – Score an extra notebook specifically for random things, such as sketches and notes. When you finish your work and your sitting there with nothing to do, rather than trying to sneak your iPod up through your sweatshirt so no one notices, take out your “design notebook” and start brainstorming. Get all your ideas down on paper.
Don’t throw away any of your failed concepts. At the end of the year it will do you great justice to have a compiled notebook of failed and accepted designs. You can see what worked and what didn’t, and hey, you might actually learn something from yourself.
Learn from usability mistakes right in front of your face. You’d be surprised, but you can pick up a lot of usability details from objects you use everyday. If you have a recently published text book, compare it to that old one from 1960 in the corner of the room. You’ll notice most books these days are much more clear cut; they draw attention to the important things and fill the pages with a lot more useful information then back in the day. Your likely to see just a bunch of jumbled text in the 1960 edition of the same book, but a lot more whitespace and vibrant colors to draw attention to details in newer editions.

Killing the Pattern Maker

November 23, 2006 By Devlounge

Recently I was hit with a comment I found hard to swallow: “All your designs look the same”. I re-read the comment a few times while I thought of a witty response, before closing the browser and telling myself to forget about it, and then deciding it’d make for one hell of a hot topic issue to bring up in an article. So here it is, the question designers have to ask themselves over and over again when creating new pieces – “Is this too similar to…”

Who is the pattern maker?

First you have to realize who the “pattern maker” is. The pattern maker is ourselves. Each one of us does things a certain way, and one we begin to do things one way, we tend to stick too it if it works and start fresh if it doesn’t. This is evident in design (finding one style or niche and sticking with it), music (a band tries to reinvent itself after a flopping album), sports (the ones your surrounded by as a kid tend to be the ones you pick up on as you grow), and etc, etc. “Patterns” literally control our lives, and many times it’s hard to break away from them.

So patterns + design equals?

As a designer, many times you fall into “ruts” or a consistent way of making sites. A lot of times, this happens after one design really gets high praise from the design community. Because it turns out well, you tend to pull and re-pull elements from that one design and re-use them in multiple instances and all different designs.

It’s not just a select few people who reuse specific elements on multiple designs either. Many times, those who browse the web frequently can spot designs and the people behind them without and knowing, simply by picking up similar tendencies that a design may show. Even such small things as how gradients are used, fonts, colors, etc can hint at who designed a specific site. For example, when I first saw the Flock site design, without knowing Brian Veloso designed it, I instantly picked up that it was done in “his style”. Does that mean he doesn’t show variety in his designs? Absolutely not. It just meant that I could pick out minor things here and there that I personally could attribute to him.

Stop comparing

So how do we stop ourselves from reusing some of those design elements over and over again? Many times, it’s just too hard to stop. Like trained dogs, some things are just stuck with us. Every time I bust open photoshop and put together a design, any time it has two columns are start saying to myself “It looks to similar to Devlounge”, and I end up forming a design with the same type of structure; logo, header, nav, two columns, footer. But that’s how I’ve been designing for ages; even before I knew anything about web standards and all the new “trends” of today, I was always setting sites up the same way since that days of Homestead WYSIWYG site builders.

And sometimes, even when you want to try to break out of that pattern, you get the clients who want you to design their project because it was your style that got them interested in the first place. I’d really love to be able to put together grunge style sites for bands again, but every requests I’ve got recently is a request for a design with the same “style” as Devlounge. Your hands get tied behind your back, and your forced to reuse some things here and there to give them that effect.

Let the pattern maker live, but let him rest too

The best bet is to limit what design elements you reuse and try to find available work that will allow you the space to experiment and try something new. I myself have to face the fact that anytime I put together a two column layout I’m going to see some reference to Devlounge, even it’s it’s the slightest bit, because I look at Devlounge every day and the setup is now burned in my head. But there’s millions of two column designs out there, so why should I compare myself to myself all the design. You’re going to find yourself adapting to a certain style and reusing it, but don’t let it phase you too much. If you designs are different, don’t let an odd comment bring you down.

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