Web designers are modern day creatives that have to have an artistic eye, marketing know-how, and understand the technical elements of website construction. Creating an attractive web page takes a lot of effort, and you have to be able to come up with a lot of ideas. When you’re a web designer you have to provide a variety of options because no two clients will ever want the same website.
One of the best things you can do is look for inspiration and ideas to start fleshing out your web design portfolio to attract as many clients as possible. Inspiration is all around both online and offline. Here are a few places to turn when you need to jumpstart your creativity.
Check Out the Work of Other Web Designers
Are there web designers that you admire? Then check out their web design portfolios. By no means should you copy exactly what they’ve done, but use their work to inspire your own designs. Take the general ideas of the pages you think work well and put your own twist on them. There are many creative people out there and seeing their work might just get your juices flowing.
WordPress Themes and Templates
Why start from scratch when there are thousands upon thousands of themes and templates to work off of? You can find examples of every type of web page imaginable from product landing page themes to contact pages.
Many of the templates are free so they’re great additions to your collection, and a lot of times you can customize them in a variety of ways to make them your own. It’s a good foundation for beginning a web design project without giving your clients a cookie cutter website.
Billboards
You may have heard the saying that home pages are like billboards. There’s a lot of truth to it, because both home pages and billboards need to get a message across quickly and capture attention in a matter of seconds.
When you pass by a billboard take note of it. Did it grab your attention? If so, why? How is the layout? Is the messaging clear? Anytime you see a billboard you like, snap a picture of it for future reference when you’re creating banners and home pages.
Window Shopping
Display windows are similar to billboards in that they are meant to capture people’s attention. They do so in a primarily visible way. How the space is utilized is extremely important. You’ll probably notice, like web design, the best window displays aren’t cluttered. They only have a few focal points and many are carefully crafted to create a story in the mind of the viewer.
Window shopping is a particularly good idea when you’re building e-commerce sites. You essentially want to create a window display for each product page.
Magazines
Print magazines may be less prominent due to the Internet, but they are still a great source of inspiration for web designers. Everything from the ads to the articles can be used to come up with layouts for a variety of web pages. These glossy magazines have top designers that create the looks for the pages. You can piggyback off of the months they spent creating the layouts by doing something similar in an online format.
Awwwards’ Winners
The Awwwards competition is a chance for web designers to show off their work. It’s a well-respected event that’s considered one of the top honors in web design. Needless to say, you’ll see some of the best, most innovative designs turned out by the Awwwards’ winners. If you want to take your web design to the next level Awwwards is something you’ll want to become familiar with.
Web design inspiration comes in many forms. Even a walk in the park or art gallery opening can get the design wheels turning. Keep your eyes and mind open and your web design portfolio will start expanding.
