Where to get design/CSS inspiration

Everyone has the places they go online to get inspiration for their latest web design/print/CSS projects. Online resources are a great place to get ideas for colour schemes, layouts, design techniques and other elements. The following is a list of sites I visit I’m when working on a new project and need some inspiration to get started. If you have any other sites please add them in the comments!

Color Lovers - Allows users to browse and share colours and colour palettes. There are thousands of colour palettes to browse making it the perfect site for choosing a scheme for a new project.

Net Cocktail - This is a CSS design gallery that takes beautiful designs and extracts the main colours from the site’s colour scheme, great for seeing how certain schemes are put to use

Design Meltdown - An invaluable resource with lots of articles exploring colour usage, design element/technique usage, and also tutorials on graphical techniques and CSS development. The designs of various site genres are also explored.

The following sites are all CSS design galleries, I won’t describe them in too much detail individually as they’re all very similar, but each one is good resource for quality design.

• CSS Remix - CSS design gallery with user voting
• CSS Import - The “no frills” CSS gallery
• CSS Beauty - A selection of tagged and categorised CSS sites, also featuring a design forum and web design news
• Inspiration King - A CSS design gallery organised by site category. Also featuring web design news
• The Daily Slurp - A new selection of CSS designs everyday
• CSS Mania - CSS designs organised by site category
• CSS Allstar - CSS designs voted on by users
• CSS Princess - Beautiful CSS sites with a “woman’s touch”

A few design related sites that recently made the homepage of Digg.com and caught my eye include -

China HTML W3C SItes - This is an absolutely huge collection of CSS based sites all crammed onto one page

The Bluesfear Worm - An amazing example of collaboration by designers from the Bluesfear design community. There are lots of design styles, colour usage and other techniques demonstrated.

There are more than enough sites here to get you started thinking about a new project, or even just for browsing to see what makes good web design.