60 great sites for designers

I find for any creative work, especially any sort of design, one needs inspiration. I find really helpful looking at examples of great websites to get inspired or watch latest trends to make sure whatever I create is actually fresh, modern and as beautiful as humanly possible :-D
I found this cool article with 60 sites for inspiration and wanted to share it with you.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/60-best-sites-designers-ann-bailey-mba

I would love to know where you get your inspiration for designing?

 

My inspiration usually comes from the CONTENT, not some goofy artsy fartsy nonsense. I start with the CONTENT or a reasonable facsimile of future content, order it in a flat text file as if HTML doesn't even exist. I then apply semantic markup (a sick euphemism for "using HTML properly") to say what things ARE, NOT what I want them to look like in any of the DOZENS of possible layouts and media targets. Then I create the layout letting the content dictate the needs of said layoutS. Yes, PLURAL. Since with responsive design and multiple media targets there's more to design

Then and only then do I worry about colours and presentational images (if any).

Right now there are a lot of feeble minded deluded fools who seem to think that graphic arts is the same thing as web design. They call themselves designers when to be brutally frank they don't know enough about HTML, CSS, emissive colourspace or accessibility to be designing a blasted thing for anyone.

Sure, their results are often very pretty, but thanks to illegible colour contrasts, goofy illegible webfonts, fixed metric sizes, and quite often "not viable for web deployment" concepts like fixed height background images, the resulting sites are effectively useless to actual users!

The sites "featured" by those "best of" linked to so far in this thread being LAUNDRY lists of how NOT to build a website; I feel sorry for anyone ingnorant enough to be deluded into thinking any of those are actually USEFUL websites or good design.

This is because DESIGN is about more than making pretty pictures. Usability, functionality and accessibility are as important to design if not more important than the goofy dicking around in Photoshop most ALLEGED "designers" waste time on. If you aren't addressing those things and terms like "responsive, elastic, semi-fluid, dynamic fonts" and so forth are foreign to you, then you are an ARTIST, NOT a designer.

Which is why most of the crap that fills up these alleged "best design" websites and almost all the nonsense at template whorehouses like themeForest and TemplateMonster are NOT design, they're ART. They are form, not function and end up useless to large swaths of users because of it!

But it's always easier to impress the suit with a checkbook who knows **** about **** with something flashy than it is actual substance; hence why such scam artist nonsense and goofball ignorant bull continues to gain traction despite being the fast lane on the road to failure.

There's a reason when it comes to design I hold up sites like Google, Amazon, E-bay and company as examples. Content oriented sites that you can be damned sure they don't have some artist spanking it on the screen in a back room involved in their layout or design unless it's for one-off's like logos. Just look at one of the biggest success stories of the Internet, Craigslist. You show that to most of the arsty fartsy "designer" halfwits, to borrow from Larry the Cable guy their "peeper will shoot in so far as to stick out their pooper"... Which is ALL the proof you need that most of the artists masquerading as "designers" know jack ***** **** about websites.

See that halfwit Awwwards garbage that @Alex_design linked to. Bad enough the site itself is an inaccessible train wreck of scripttardery and illegible colours (black on dark grey, light grey on light grey, really ***holes?) the sites they showcase are fat bloated trainwrecks of illegible text over massive images that have no damned business on websites in the first place, mostly to cover up for a complete lack of anything remotely resembling content of value!

90% of those sites you deploy for a business in the UK, you'd be facing fines for failing to meet accessibility minimums.

... at the end of the day users visit websites for the CONTENT, not the goofy graphics, annoying scripttardery or other asshattery people hang around the content DISTRACTING FROM IT; and that's why most of what people call "Design" these days is ineptly built inaccessible rubbish that can only be explained either through utter and complete ignorance, or simply being outright scam artist snake oil peddling.

Try Pirelli's Miracle Elixir, it'll do the trick sir, true sir true... did it in a tick sir just like an elixir ought to do.

 

@deathshadow you have reminded me of this quote “Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.” - Jeffrey Zeldman

 

But I absolutely agree with you, the content should come before pretty pictures. The thing is, I work in a rather big company, so I am only part of the team, mostly responsible for the look and feel and how psychologically things will be perceived by the visitors, that's why I research what's trending technical part is not part of what I do
p.s. your comments about art made me laugh because one of my educations is actually being an artist (painting), so yeah, I guess that influences the way I work :-D