A picture is worth a thousand words. Who hasn’t heard that before? Well, it’s true. One look at the smashing success that is Instagram should hint at the fact that humans are visual creatures. Despite how compelling good visuals can be, we now live in a world where there is such content overload that standing out, if that’s the goal, is a challenge.
Design is a critical part of the work we do with our clients. Whether we’re designing a website or thinking through how we can create visually compelling stories told in a series of 10-second videos, keeping our design innovative and unique is something we work at constantly. Like all things, with design practice makes perfect and looking to talented designers for inspiration is also a major source of learning. Here are four sites we use regularly to draw inspiration from.
Dribbble
Dribbble is our all around favorite site for design inspiration. It is a vast community of designers and agencies that regularly share their work. Dribbble has it all: logos & branding, UX/UI, packaging design, illustration, and animation. You can create a free account, follow designers and easily search designs by color or keyword. We can sing Dribbble’s praises enough.
Coolors.co
Coolors.co is the savvy digital version of spending hours at Home Depot or Lowes looking through endless combinations of paint strips. An inevitable exercise for any design project is choosing a color palette. The Coolors free palette generator can be hypnotizing, but is ridiculously convenient providing users the ability to generate endless palettes, lock colors into place, explore alternative shades and grab the hex code for application. For those with more intense color needs, you can also grab the Coolors mobile app.
Motionographer
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how much is a video or animation worth? One of the best ways of enhancing a website’s design, adding elegance to your user’s experience, or standing out on social media is to add some motion to your creative. Motionographer is another platform that aggregates inspiring work from top quality animators, designers and storytellers, but with a heavier appetite for movement. We immerse ourselves daily in a digest of hypnotic movement from the talented producers that contribute to Motionographer and you should too.
Behance
Behance is an Adobe owned platform for showcasing and discovering creative work. If you know anything about design then you’re familiar with Adobe and the industry leading software they offer. An advantage that Behance offers it the ability to browse projects by which Adobe suite product was used to create them. It’s nice way to segment what type of creative you’re searching for.
