Design Inspiration You're Not Cool Enough For

Want to know where all the cool kids are going to for design inspiration, and me too? How about a little dose of beauty to brighten your day? If yes, then look no further. Here are six fantastic websites to help influence your next web project!

Be it designers, photographers, or illustrators - all creatives understand the importance of inspiration and how the right insight can become the key to any project. It is very important to shape your eyes as a web designer and streamline your ideas. Not only do we need to make content easily consumed, but I would contend we should also make it strikingly beautiful whenever we can. Who wants a boring internet?

I see most designers relying on Dribble to find inspiration but here’s a hot take: Dribble is not a great source of inspiration for web developers. Most of the designs are not implemented as live websites, which can mean the creators haven’t considered subtle aspects of responsive design, accessibility, and UI/UX.

Luckily for you, I have compiled a list of my six favorite hipster resources to gain design inspiration from (watch out for mustaches and leather aprons!). Keep on reading to learn more about each of these sources and why they are worth a bookmark or even, dare I say it, a tab on open.

1. The Brand Identity

The very first website that you can turn to is the-brandidentity. With its creative interface, this website can be your go-to source of inspiration for web design. I love it because it is unique and makes browsing for website ideas easier and more intuitive. It's a branding website but serves to inform you a lot about typography, layout, and design.

2. Typewolf

The next site in our go-to list of best hipster web design inspirations is a website called Typewolf. If you are a web designer looking for unique and trending typography, then this could be your holy grail. It tells you what's trending in typography and how you can elevate your design with it. You can learn about font combinations and even search websites by font. It is really helpful for improving your typography and discovering new font pairings to use in your web design.

3. Klikkentheke

Another amazing website for getting your daily dose of inspiration is klikkentheke. Unlike its hefty pronunciation, the website itself is pretty basic and editorial. Its minimalistic design has an amazing niche and premium selection. The surprising thing is that not a lot of people know about this website so it's pretty much a hidden gem. I can get lost for hours browsing this website - they do a really good job of standing out, especially with thoughtful and unique categorization.

4. Visual Journal

As a web designer, you need to shape your ideas and Visual journal is the best website for that. It is going to give you very creative ideas about colors and layout. All in all, it is a great source of web design inspiration and will surely help you become a better designer. My favorite thing about Visual Journal is that it pulls from a wide range of sources with a laser focus on showing us what’s cool RIGHT NOW.

5. Godly

Godly is… intense. There’s a lot going on just on the home page, with near-infinite amounts of inspiration. I usually click one of the many filters first thing just to keep myself from getting overwhelmed by inspiration. It’s dangerous, might end up feeling TOO inspired from this website and just start painting the walls of my apartment split complimentary colors. Shhhhh! Don’t tell my landlord Walter but thank goodness for San Francisco rent control if you do. One on my favorite things about Godly is how prominent they display animations. From the thumbnail, you can clearly see how the website behaves and witness thousands of buttery smooth animations. You might say that it’s… inspiring.

6. Hoverstat

The last on the list is Hoverstat. I love Hoverstat because of the little one sentence blurbs that each featured website gets. These blurbs are a behind-the-scenes snippet that tells you WHY the website was actually chosen. It’s like curation trying not to be overrun by compilation. I often find curation websites feel like Los Angeles’s 93.1 JACK FM of the web, “we play what we want.” Actually, I don’t usually like to mix my Tupac with my Sting with my ABBA thank you very much. The fact that Hoverstat explains their reason makes me breath a sigh of relief, I can trust these curators. Which gets me wondering if Open.ai has any sort of website curation API? Hmmm…

Thanks for checking out these super f***ing hip-and-cool in fact so f***ing hip-and-cool-you-did-not-know-about-them-until-I-told-you websites. Maybe you and I will end up on these pages one day. I’ll start growing my mustache now just to be ready.