What’s Your Go-To Design Inspiration for Web Creativity

Hello Everyone,

Hope you're all brewing with ideas and creativity today!

I’ve been thinking a lot about where we, as designers, pull our inspiration from. Sometimes it’s a splash of color from a sunset, or the sleek lines of a new gadget. Other times, it’s scrolling through Behance or Dribbble until something clicks.

So, here’s my question to you: What’s the most unusual place or thing that has inspired one of your web design projects? Was it a piece of street art, a scene from a movie, or maybe a random doodle on a napkin?

Let’s share and celebrate the wild, the weird, and the wonderful sources of our creativity. Drop your stories, and if you’ve got pictures of your inspired designs!

Looking forward to getting inspired by your stories,

 

Oddly for me it was some advice from Dan Schulz. A member here who passed away a little over a decade ago. There were two major points that influenced my design ideals.

1) People don't visit websites for the graphics you hang around the content, they visit FOR the content.

2) The best design is one the user doesn't notice.

Both of these are an anathema to artists under the DELUSION they're some sort of designer. And make no mistake, the majority of clowns, poseurs, and frauds calling themselves "web designers" wouldn't know design from the hole in their rump.

Like most I started out a total art {expletive omitted} -- hell this bottom b**** still is -- when it came to design. Starting out in the late '90's up until about 2002 I was all in on skeuomorphic design... right up until I found out it's a waste of everyone's time, a colossal waste of bandwidth, and in many cases pisses on UX from orbit.

Which is why I saw "flat design" coming and started to adopt it before Apple threw the entire discussion on its ear. In a room of designers screaming "LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT MY ART!!!" Apple in one fell swoop made everyone turn and listen... with a whisper.

Shame without Jobbo's leadership they seem to have forgotten what made their web presence the poster child for good design! The current "design" at Apple feeling more like cheap marketing blurbs used for advertising cheap Chinese phones on Amazon!

Like right now on a project I've got a fancy visual design that... well... I'm ready to throw in the trash and strip back to basics because the site should be entirely information and content driven. Don't get too fancy for your own good!

If you have content of value, organized in an easy to access manner, that's able to reach as many people as possible, that is quality DESIGN!

Dicking around drawing goofy pictures in Photoshop or sharting out wireframes in Figma is NOT design because all you're giving a damn about is appearance. Websites and even most apps are about MORE than just appearance. Screen readers, braille readers, search engines, print, and dozens of other possible devices and limitations are as much -- if not more -- a part of design than the goofball "lipstick on a pig" most artists vomit up and pretend is design.

Progressive enhancement my friend:

1) Start out with your content or a reasonable facsimile of future content in a flat text editor, and organize it to make sense as if HTML doesn't even exist.

2) Mark it up semantically -- saying what things are and NOT WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE -- so it's accessible to everyone. As this is the semantics stage, DIV and SPAN have no business being written yet.

In all but the rarest of corner cases -- usually "custom properties" these days -- If you choose any of your tags, classes, id's, or attributes based on what you want it to look like, You have utterly, totally, and completely failed to divine HTML's flipping purpose, and are taking a giant steaming dump on your markup!

Yes, I realize that makes 99.99% of all "front end frameworks" utter and total incompetent garbage! Because that's ALL THEY ARE!

3) create your EXTERNAL stylesheet bending the markup to your will to create your largest screen media layout. Add DIV and SPAN only where and as needed to group elements to avoid shitting classes on everything, or for style once you've expended what can be done on existing elements. An increasingly less frequent situation in HTML 5.

When possible try to use wrapping behavior -- flex-wrap:wrap, columns:xxrem; natural flow wrapping behavior -- to avoid having to make media queries or have to micromanage content sizes. See wuck-fittery like failwind and bootcrap's col-4-s col-6-m bullshit for how NOT to do it!

4) Narrow the display until the layout breaks, figure out how many REM that is, there's your media query breakpoint. Adjust the layout accordingly.

5) lather, rinse, repeat step 4 until down below 16rem.

6) Add your colours, presentational images, and other such affectations.

7) Create your print stylesheet if desired.

8) If this is for a website you should already have ALL basic functionality working. ENHANCE it further with JavaScript if desired. If you can't get basic functionality on a website without client-side scripting, you either need to learn more HTML/CSS, or are just plain doing something WRONG!

NOTE, Apps is a different story since they're inherently client-side scripting and thus already told a good chunk of accessibility where to stick it.

On a website? Quality JavaScript enhances the UX, but should never be the only means of the user doing things. Anyone telling you otherwise is packing your fudge. With raisins and peanuts.

It's called progressive enhancement, and working that way ensures your design gracefully degrades.

THAT IS DESIGN!

Design is engineering that incorporates art as one of its many facets. It is NOT art unto and of itself!

The artsy fartsy PSD jockeys, wireframe morons, and copypasta developers blindly copying broken bloated incompetent "framework" trash then shoe-horning content into it? FRAUDS every last flipping one of them!