“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” ~ Stephen King

When you’re in search of inspiration, it can be hard to find. But, when you least expect it, it seems to smack you in the face. We can’t always wait for inspiration to find us in the world of advertising and graphic design, which is why our team is always on the hunt for new sources of inspiration.

Sometimes, inspiration strikes when we see the new graffiti on the wall by our favorite lunch spot, when we hear a new song on the radio, or from a wild dream we had, but those moments can seem few and far between. How do we cope? We rely on resources that are easily available to us, like social media and industry-specific sites. And, of course, we all have a love affair with Pinterest. When we’re not pinning away, we browse through some of our other favorites – many of which you might also find inspiring. Keep reading to learn more!

Design Inspiration

Websites:

Dribble
We can always count on other designers to provide great ideas to get the ball rolling on something that might work for the big project on our to-do list.

Awwwards
A compilation of award-winning designs seems like a pretty good place to start on the search for inspiration.

Typewolf
Typography and font can make or break a design; they’re such major elements, though sometimes their impact is overlooked. Here, we can find out what’s trending based on what others are doing.

Design Inspiration
This site brings together art, branding, architecture, and web design for the ultimate source of inspiration. It’s basically a more niche form of Pinterest.

Behance
A perfect place for designers to showcase their work in art, photography, branding, and more.

Niice
We love that this platform lets you collaborate with our team and other designers. Collaboration is often the most rewarding source of inspiration.

The Dieline
This is a fantastic resource for package design and branding inspiration, resources, news, and more. It helps us stay up-to-date on trends and what’s going on in the industry.

AIGA Eye On Design
This site is published by AIGA, a professional association for designers, and highlights some of the most exciting new work from the world’s emerging and established visual communicators.

Instagram:

Malika Favre + @malikafavre
This French illustration artist is magnifique! She does amazing things with negative space, and you’d probably recognize her work for Sephora, The New Yorker, Budweiser, and Vogue.

Jolby & Friends + @jolbyandfriends
We’re on board to Ride the Weird with these friends. They’re big into typography and bold design, and we’re big into everything they’re doing.

Brett Stenson + @brettpstenson
One of the friends in the Jolby & Friends group, he’s an art director and illustrator from the Midwest living in the Northwest. He’s got an eclectic design style that’s all his own, and we love when his posts pop up in our feed with a mix of work samples and outdoor photography.

Christopher DeLorenzo + @chrisdelorenzo
This graphic artist from Massachusetts always keeps us guessing. We think it’s rad how his work mixes color with a lack thereof.

Tad Carpenter + @tadcarpenter
He does a great job of utilizing both the bright and bold, as well as neutrals and muted pastels in his designs. His choice of color combinations inspires us.

Doublenaut + @doublenautdesign
These guys skillfully mix clean and simple with abstract and off-the-wall. Plus, we’d love to visit Toronto and drink a few of the beers bearing their work on the labels.

Studio JQ + @madebystudiojq
This UK-based branding, illustration, and digital art studio is a little trippy, but always interesting. Checking out this feed encourages us to think outside the box in our own design.

Damian Kidd + @damian_kidd
This Kidd is an awesome illustrator and logo, brand, and UI designer. His minimalist designs prove that simplicity can be effective.

Web Design & Development

HTML/CSS/JS:

CSS Tricks
Some of the most powerful inspiration can come from confidence, and this website helps us get there with tricks and troubleshooting ideas.

David Walsh
Demos, tutorials, and other resources are easy to find and understand.

Can I Use?
This site provides up-to-date browser support tables for front-end web technologies on desktop and mobile web browsers.

WordPress:

Pippin’s Plugins
Inspired to start learning WordPress? These easy-to-follow tutorials can help you learn the basics to get your creative juices flowing.

Frameworks/Boilerplates:

Zurb Foundation
This site makes it easier for us go from inspired to actively to designing beautiful responsive websites for any device.

Bootstrap
We love working on mobile projects when we use this platform. It makes it so quick and easy to get from prototype to building.

Underscores
This hacking/starter theme lets our inspiration grow beyond our wildest dreams into the coolest WordPress theme out there.

HTML Shell
This site puts developers on the right track with a pretty solid base/default HTML code with a simple copy-paste.

Workflow:

Coolors
When we’re stuck on color schemes for web projects, Coolors is our go-to for super-fast color palette ideas!

Lucid Chart
Here, we can make almost any diagram or chart you’d ever need – from the simple to the most complex, this site can handle it all. Plus, you can collaborate with your team!

Code Snippets:

CodePen
We love checking out the awesome projects other web developers and designers have been rocking, and we can even share our own.

Codrops
We love finding inspiration by learning about the newest trends, techniques, and possibilities in web design and development.

Other

Art Station
It’s not our traditional source of inspiration for client work, but it provides an nice escape to let our minds wander and pick up ideas from unexpected places. It’s actually a personal work portfolio site for a video game artist.