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There are a number of web galleries that feature inspirational web designs. These web galleries serve a purpose, and that is to update people on new trends and showcase sites that are pushing the boundaries. It is important, as a designer, that you know what the latest trends are and see how other people are pushing the boundaries. In this article, you will find some of the best web galleries that you can reference for inspiration.
So, what are web galleries?
Website gallery (or web gallery)- a web based gallery.
Whyzz defines gallery as:
Galleries are often small spaces, and they’re generally private—meaning that they’re owned by one person or a small group of people. They often show the work of one artist, or a small group of artists or works based on a particular theme.
Image by: Glen Converse
With this definition in mind, we can say web galleries are gallery-like or platforms that showcase the works of designers . These are websites created for the purpose of inspiring others. They’re especially great for beginners, and allow the original designers a chance to gain more exposure and show what they can do to the rest of the world.
There are two main reasons why designers, and particularily beginners, should visit web galleries: to be inspired by others’ works and be motivated.
Image by: photosteve101
In any kind of field, especially in web design, it is important to be inspired by others’ works. This way, you have a role model, or a specific designer that really fires up your creative juices, that you can always turn to when you feel down, or when you lack motivation.
I have interviewed people who I find successful in the field they have chosen to work in and asked them questions regarding inspiration and web galleries. Take time to read and get inspired by their answers.
Questions:
[1]“I’m a fan of theprofessionalheckler, and I can honestly say that I never really dreamt of becoming a full-time blogger, I only wanted to try it and see if it will work for me. Good thing is, I have really love writing ever since I was young and after seeing how blogging works and how wide the audience is I got hooked into it and I’m loving it.”
[2]“An inspiration may point towards a person or a dream, or both. Having someone to look up to makes you think “Wow, I want to be like him/her someday” or “I want to be better,” things like this will give you the energy to move forward. Some may go to the extremes of saying having a role model is their Raison d’Etre (reason for existence) but don’t laugh, in order to live people need something to look forward to, otherwise it’s a lonely world. Without an object of inspiration, people will become aimless, with an object of inspiration people are guided. Inspiration plus a touch of madness results in a dream come true.”
[3]“Yes, while drinking my coffee I read my favorite blogs. How often, you ask? 5 times a day, give or take a few.”
[1]“Those people that I find are better than I am. I don’t want to be second best, I want to be the very best! You may find that very childish, but for me this is my way of motivating myself and putting in the effort and the work to be even better than the best.”
[2]“For when we are inspired, we always do things in an extraordinary way. We always reach for excellence in everything we do. Without inspiration, those things are not possible. And for me, inspiration is proportional to passion. If you have passion in what you do, I’m sure inspiration will also come through.”
[3]“Yes, whenever I lack ideas regarding my projects. I often visit Pattern Tap.”
[1]“My inspiration is my future. I always do my best so that I can meet my goals in life, and that is to be a successful designer.”
[2]“I believe that inspiration gives you brighter design. It calms your mind and makes your design acceptable.”
[3]“Yes, whenever I design I make it a point to visit web galleries. This helps me to come up with different ideas.”
[1]“My fellow designers inspire me the most. When I see how beautiful their designs are, I get inspired to make my designs better than theirs.”
[2]“Of course if you are inspired, you tend to make a better design than the one that inspired you.”
[3]“Very often. These serve as my references for new layouts and designs. It’s useful to know what the new design trends are.
[1]“I don’t have a specific person, but I have some friends and classmates who inspire me with their works.”
[2]“We really need inspiration because it triggers us to do the things we like. It also influences us to come up with a unique idea or concept based on the things around us. Also, inspiration helps me fight laziness. Haha!”
[3]“Yes, when I have time.”
[1]“I am easily inspired by designs that I see as beautiful, amazing and full of emotion. It gives me the drive that if someone can do it, I can do at least as good if not better.”
[2]“We need inspiration to do what we want and to deeply express ourselves. It is something that motivates or pushes me to give my best.”
[3]“Yes, when I think that I need to get some ideas or inspiration I visit web galleries.”
[1]“My inspiration is my dreams. I get inspired to be the best in everything I do to reach my dreams. And my dream is to be successful in the field I chose.”
[2]“For me, inspiration is important. This is where I get my ideas to do my job.”
[3]“Of course. During my free time, I make it a point to visit web galleries. You can learn techniques that you can use on your projects.”
With all of their answers, we can conclude that inspiration is an important factor that affects a persons work and one source of inspiration we can consider is web galleries.
Motivation is also important in any work. This keeps you moving towards reaching your goals. To be motivated, you need to have your inspiration, in any kind of work, motivation is necessary to do your best and enjoy what you do.
It is important to know what’s going on around you. For designers it’s important to know what the latest trends are in web design. Why? The answer is very simple, so that they won’t be left behind. We all know that viewers want to see and experience the newest or the latest design trends.
Image by: Web Interactive Films
People always want the most current technology whether in gadgets, software, or the web design they see, or the website they hire someone to design. With web galleries, designers can stay current and see new technologies in use, and see the trends in design.
To better appreciate web galleries,and what you can learn from them, here are some ways that I believe they can be useful:
Write down what parts of your design need work then when you look through the web galleries you can ask these questions:
Image by: Martin Bright
Take note of your answers, for these will be the basis on what type of web gallery you need.
After writing down where you are having issues of difficulty, try and search for a web gallery that is relevant to your problem. There are web galleries that focus on CSS, WordPress, typography, etc.
There are many galleries there that focus on a certain niche. Say if you are searching for inspiration for a Flash website, search for a web gallery that showcases great Flash websites.
To help you in searching, I will be listing some of the best web galleries that you may find useful at the end of this article.
Searching is kind of like shopping. When searching, take at least 10–15 minutes of your time finding sites thatmay provide you the inspiration you need. Spend one minute or less on each and when you find one that inspires you, bookmark it so you can come back to it whenever you need.
Image by: Lukas Kummer
When you visit these sites regularly, you can stay current with new trends and learn techniques being used by others in your field.
Benefits of visiting Web Galleries
What are the benefits of visiting these web galleries?
And here are some of the great web galleries you can find on the net. Make sure to bookmark those that tickled your taste!
The Best Designs showcases the best Flash and CSS websites grouped into different categories.
We Love WP, a web gallery that showcases WordPress powered websites.
Make Better Websites supports several designers by featuring their designs on the site. The nice thing about this site is you can filter your search with the tags and colors provided on the right panel.
Design Shack lists inspiring web designs, resources and tutorials to help designers.
Minimal Sites is a gallery dedicated to, what else, minimalism in web design. Designs are categorized to give comfort and faster searching on users.
DrupalSites.net showcases websites that use the open source CMS, Drupal. The purpose of this site is to present the flexibility and advantages Drupal has to offer.
Designflavr describes their site as: “A Design and Visual Art Gallery.” They aim to share the best design content they can.
Pattern Tap aims to give inspiration to designers regarding the best interface designs on the web.
A gallery that showcases CSS/XHTML and Flash designs as well as the designers.
A gallery that compiles great designs and imagery where users can vote on each submitted work.
Styleboost has been showcasing beautiful websites created by several designers and developers for more than nine years from now. The good thing about this site is it gives an introduction to the different kinds of websites they present.
Nice Stylesheet gives a collection of website designs that make use of CSS and web standards.
Web creme features CSS web designs that can be filtered depending on your choice of color or month.
A portal for all web designers and developers that aims to make it fun searching for the hottest sites on the web.
CartFrenzy gives you the best designed e-commerce and online shopping websites.
Best Web Gallery is an inspiration site for designers with a wide range of websites that use Flash and CSS. They say that a quality design is:
Quality Design = Visual + Technical + Creativity
This is a community website that also contains a gallery of websites that use Joomla. The search can be filtered into your choice of color, topic, country etc.
Blog Design Heroes showcases well-designed blogs on the web that are grouped into categories according to platform.
A website gallery of several websites that use different CMS’ such as Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and the like.
TypeInspire features typography created by many graphic and web designers. It aims to provide you with excellent typographic works for inspiration.
That’s it! I hope this article gave you some ideas on where to find inspiration and hopefully next time you’re needing some inspiration, or you need a new idea, you’ll check out some of these web galleries.
We know that we just touched on some of the ways and places you can find inspiration. We’d love to hear your thoughts, so if you feel so inclined, tell us:
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An Information Technology graduate who loves learning new things and chocolates, too. She spends the whole day sitting in front of the computer, making herself updated with the things going on around her.
Friday, August 5th, 2011 11:14
Excellent list of galleries I was already using few of it. however it is good to know more.
Friday, March 11th, 2011 22:56
Nice post, I’m no longer a web designer (ERP programmer these days), but still interesting stuff and good advice.
I read the post because I noticed in my stats that you linked my shopping pic – I just wanted to say thanks for crediting me and linking my image back to my photostream on flickr. It is very appreciated and does not go unnoticed that there are some folks that still know how things are done ;)
Monday, February 21st, 2011 23:28
Check out http://getgalleried.com – this pulls feeds from some of the best galleries and let’s you organize sites into your own personal inspiration library. Excuse the self-promotion here :P but we built this because I’m a gallery junkie and I needed a better way to find and organize inspiration. Hopefully helps a few of you too :)
Sunday, February 20th, 2011 21:52
That just made my RSS feed unread count triple!
Awesome Sauce covered in Uber Juice
Friday, February 11th, 2011 03:40
actually I think you missed one of the best galleries out there : http://www.designfridge.co.uk/
Friday, February 11th, 2011 00:46
I myself run regrouped.net which is a compilation of gallery sites such as much listed above. Hope it can help people.
Friday, February 11th, 2011 00:45
recently found this one website, you can add to the list
http://goodwebdesign.co/
Thursday, February 10th, 2011 23:19
Great list , Creattica and MinimalSites are 2 of my favorites ones, we all need inspiration from time to time,
Marios
Thursday, February 10th, 2011 05:56
Great resources here, some of which are new to me.
Thanks
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 17:29
thanks for featuring Make Better Websites!
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 16:50
Great Post! I’d have to say that Creattica, Behance, Web Creme, CSS Creme are my favorite inspiration sites. Screenalicious is not bad either -
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 16:03
http://www.cssloaf.com is a good one.. feeds from tons of css galleries so its a good ‘one stop shop’ one.
also love pattern tap!
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 14:58
And where is deviantart? It’s my favourite, but I love Creattica too. I didn’t know the other websites, thanks for share.
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David Mejias
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 14:58
And where is deviantart? It’s my favourite, but I love Creattica too. I didn’t know the other websites, thanks for share.
Eko S
Thursday, February 10th, 2011 05:56
Great resources here, some of which are new to me.
Thanks
Dessign
Thursday, February 10th, 2011 23:19
Great list , Creattica and MinimalSites are 2 of my favorites ones, we all need inspiration from time to time,
Marios
David Hellmann
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 17:29
thanks for featuring Make Better Websites!
Brian Jones
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 16:50
Great Post! I’d have to say that Creattica, Behance, Web Creme, CSS Creme are my favorite inspiration sites. Screenalicious is not bad either -
Marie Nolan
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 16:03
http://www.cssloaf.com is a good one.. feeds from tons of css galleries so its a good ‘one stop shop’ one.
also love pattern tap!
matt
Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 16:32
http://cssrockstar.com is nicely run as well.
webmozg
Friday, February 11th, 2011 00:45
recently found this one website, you can add to the list
http://goodwebdesign.co/
kevin
Friday, February 11th, 2011 00:46
I myself run regrouped.net which is a compilation of gallery sites such as much listed above. Hope it can help people.
Mark
Friday, August 5th, 2011 11:14
Excellent list of galleries I was already using few of it. however it is good to know more.
lukas k
Friday, March 11th, 2011 22:56
Nice post, I’m no longer a web designer (ERP programmer these days), but still interesting stuff and good advice.
I read the post because I noticed in my stats that you linked my shopping pic – I just wanted to say thanks for crediting me and linking my image back to my photostream on flickr. It is very appreciated and does not go unnoticed that there are some folks that still know how things are done ;)
Dave Keller
Monday, February 21st, 2011 23:28
Check out http://getgalleried.com – this pulls feeds from some of the best galleries and let’s you organize sites into your own personal inspiration library. Excuse the self-promotion here :P but we built this because I’m a gallery junkie and I needed a better way to find and organize inspiration. Hopefully helps a few of you too :)
Dainis Graveris
Sunday, June 17th, 2012 13:13
Oh this is an interesting idea!
emil
Friday, February 11th, 2011 03:40
actually I think you missed one of the best galleries out there : http://www.designfridge.co.uk/
Elaine
Tuesday, February 15th, 2011 23:40
Great resources. Thanks!
Mark
Sunday, February 20th, 2011 21:52
That just made my RSS feed unread count triple!
Awesome Sauce covered in Uber Juice