Looking for Design Ideas
by ZetaGecko | Add Your Comments | Web Design
You're website design is feeling a little stale. You need to find some fresh ideas. Where do you go? Here are some ideas:
Visit the sites of well known designers.
If you happen to know the names of some well known designers and web-techniques masters, you can find their homepages with a Google search. A few you might come across this way, and a quick comment on each, include:
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report, which ironically isn't always updated daily. Pleasing color scheme, nice photo....but surprisingly low contrast for some of the text. The site includes a way to adjust the contrast, but of course, you have to find the low-contrast link to the control to do it.
Dave Shea's mezzoblue (creator of the CSS Zen Garden). Mezzoblue was recently redesigned, and I have to be honest, I'm not entirely thrilled with the latest. Very low contrast in some places (this is oddly common on the sites of people you'd think would avoid low contrast like the plague), and some of the text is a bit small. But there are some cool features there. Click the icons with the "A"s in them (near the upper right corner) to see the old design or the new with larger or smaller text.
The Man in Blue (Cameron Adams). Here's a nice design. High contrast, at last. A cool three-part background image (a tiling pattern and one image each that sticks to the top and bottom of the page, text size adjustment control (in three sizes) one click shows you that page with no stylesheet, and a color gradient at the top of each blog entry adds a nice effect.
The problem you quickly recognize as you look for design ideas this way is that you're seeing a bunch of blogs, and they all have a certain amount of structural similarity that might not work for what you're trying to accomplish. On to the other method:
Visit the sites of big companies, who ought to be able to afford to hire good designers.
This is what I usually do when I'm feeling the need for a little inspiration. Just pick the names of the biggest companies you can think of: auto manufacturers, computer and other electronics firms, entertainment companies, etc. Lots of the designs are uninspiring (though perhaps instructive--beautiful isn't always the most effective way to go), but once in a while you'll hit something really good. Here are two that are worthy of note:
IBM: Notes: you don't have to scroll your browser window (unless it's pretty small); they give you a few different ways to navigate to what your interested in ("Products & Services" and "Support & downloads" across the top, "Resources for..." along the site, select a country popup, and a few links to specific things in the middle.
Apple Computer: Notes: Good two-level tab and menu system across the top, which stays consistent through most if not all of the site; Hilights their latest greatest developments in an area covering most of the homepage, and adds more headlines in the "Hot News Headlines" bar below.
Once you've gotten an idea here and an idea there from various sites, consider how they might be applied to your site to communicate effectively with your audience, and go from there.