- Albert Lo – Freelance digital creative
One of the best ways to get inspiration and motivation is to look at our peers in the industries that [...]
- The Iconic Fail Whale
By now I think everyone knows the Fail Whale. While Twitter was gaining in popularity it had quite a reputation [...]
- Amazing Origami Art!
Origami. That fun paper folding art that has been around longer than anyone can remember produces some of the most [...]
- Amazing Insect Macro Photography
Macro photography sits in the category of taking very close-up photos that reveal an amazing amount of detail. A lot [...]
- Awesome High Detail Portrait Digital Illustration
Here is a collection of some very VERY good digital art and illustration.
- Make your website ‘pop’ with great typography
OK, so the word ‘pop’ is like a needle in the eye for any designer who’s client gives feedback [...]
- Video Game Website Design Examples
Most of the web designers and developers that I know are also avid gamers. With video games becoming more advanced, [...]
- Getting design inspiration when you’re stuck in an office.
Get out of the office for some “research”.
As designers we take inspiration from everywhere and anywhere. Working in an office [...] - 21 Horror Movie Posters for Design Inspiration
Everything old is new again. That’s the saying anyway.
Old movies have played their part in inspiration for years with [...] - Designing a creative and useful sidebar
A website is usually made up of standard components. One often overlooked component of a website is the sidebar. When [...]
Albert Lo – Freelance digital creative
One of the best ways to get inspiration and motivation is to look at our peers in the industries that we work in. If we get the chance to see what goes through the mind of the people we respect in our industry we can use this to further our own skills and refine our working practice.
At Very Inspirational we try to help our community out by running small interviews to give you some insight into how these great artists work.
We hope you enjoy this quick interview with Alber Lo, a fantastic UX web designer & visit his website.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Iconic Fail Whale
By now I think everyone knows the Fail Whale. While Twitter was gaining in popularity it had quite a reputation of outgrowing itself and just being out of service. The fail whale, created by Yiying Lu has become just an iconic page that there is even a fan club failwhale.com
The fail whale, as a design idea, has made it OK to occasionally fail in your website. No longer is a 404 a complete catastrophe. All you need to do is create yourself a nice, fun error page to let your members know its not the end of the world. Do it right and you might just end up with your own iconic 404 page when your website grows.
As a tribute to the fail whale, here is a collection of wacky, weird and unusual interpretations of the Fail Whale image.
Amazing Origami Art!
Origami. That fun paper folding art that has been around longer than anyone can remember produces some of the most amazing and mind challenging art-forms. Just take a look at the following and you will surly feel the need to grab some paper and give it a go.
Visit Origami Instructions for some tips and instructions on origami.
Amazing Insect Macro Photography
Macro photography sits in the category of taking very close-up photos that reveal an amazing amount of detail. A lot of the detail is not visible to the naked eye, and when it comes to bugs and insects this is due to the size and also speed. We simply don’t get to see the detail.
This post is about taking the time to look at the beauty of the little creatures that live amoungst us.
Awesome High Detail Portrait Digital Illustration
Here is a collection of some very VERY good digital art and illustration.
Make your website ‘pop’ with great typography
OK, so the word ‘pop’ is like a needle in the eye for any designer who’s client gives feedback like “it just needs to POP more”, but hey, I think you all know what I mean here. Typography in design can be the key difference between an average design and a masterpiece of usability.
Below are some ways that you can spice up your website designs and raise the quality of your portfolio. Your clients will love you for it.
Using Custom Fonts
Thanks to CSS we can safely use custom fonts on websites now. Just keep in mind that not all browsers support the use of otf,ttf or eot files. But don’t let this stop you, just make sure that you have a backup default font that still fits with your design. If you cover all bases then you wont have users suffer a horrible website if they are stuck on old browsers.
These are simple to create and implement using a conversion tool like ttf2eot and then use the @font-face to embed the file reference into your style sheet.
The user doesn’t need the font on their system, so don’t forget to upload it to your server.
Read the rest of this entry »
Video Game Website Design Examples
Most of the web designers and developers that I know are also avid gamers. With video games becoming more advanced, larger worlds and greater detail, you can take some great inspiration form a few different places from video games.
The following is a great collection of video game website designs that not only match their theme and market, but also showcase some excellent interactive qualities that most of us don’t get to use in a website.
Read the rest of this entry »
Getting design inspiration when you’re stuck in an office.
Get out of the office for some “research”.
As designers we take inspiration from everywhere and anywhere. Working in an office all day I find that the design life can get sucked right out of me and coming up with creative and fresh ideas is hard with the buzz of a workplace + phones + radio (playing crappy music).
So what do you do? Step one is to envy any full time freelancers who get to design where the want. Read the rest of this entry »
This is by far the most flexible way to get the creative juices flowing. Try and take a note out of their book, and if your able to, take your sketch book and wander out of the office. This is a great start that will just let your mind wander in a different direction that it would at your desk.
21 Horror Movie Posters for Design Inspiration
Everything old is new again. That’s the saying anyway.
Old movies have played their part in inspiration for years with bands like the Misfits and Rob Zombie breathing life into the artistic style of Horror movies in particular.
The movie posters of yesteryear are not only outrageously designed but they are bold in colour and show great detail in their own quirky way. These posters are very simple and actually lend themselves very well to website design. Just in using similar fonts and creating a web layout with the same theme as some of these posters you get a very unique looking design that is sure to make for an impressive portfolio.
Here they are
Designing a creative and useful sidebar
A website is usually made up of standard components. One often overlooked component of a website is the sidebar. When I’m building a website I put a strong emphasis on the layout of the sidebar. The hardest part for me is having the client understand that the sidebar is an important feature of the website rather then just a collection of “stuff” that has nowhere else to go.
The conversation would usually go like this:
Client: “Sidebar? um… Lets do that last, just put anything in. Shouldn’t we just focus on the content pages?” Read the rest of this entry »
Me: “Well sure, the page content is the focus and the SEO optimized part of the website. But how often you go to a website and glance over at the sidebar to see how many RSS subscribers the website has? Do you try and look for how many twitter followers the website has? Or Facebook fans? Don’t get me wrong, none of these stats actually make for a good website BUT they do indicate just how many other people might like the content”.
Client : “OK I admit, I do that”.
Me: “Do you also scan the sidebar to see what else the website has to offer, besides the page you are on?”.
Client: “Yes I do that too. OK I see your point and lets get some focus into my sidebar now”.
22 Graphically Outstanding Website Designs
As a web designer, you want your website design to leave an impression that gets people scrolling to the footer to see just who built this amazing website! After all, the best sales tool is word of mouth and the best person to sell you skills is your work that’s “in the wild”.
To get that finished level that sets your web design skills apart from the pack, take some tips from these 22 website designs that are graphically outstanding.
Be sure not to over use heavy images. Slice like a ninja and optimise so that you still get a fast load time.
So take a look at the designs below and take what you can and push you own ideas into the next level.
The excellent blog design of Splendid Sparrow
I give credit to my wife who actually came across the works of Teresa a few months ago while wandering the Internet looking for blog design inspiration.
There are a lot of blog designers out there, but what I love about Teresa’s work is that its consistent and she designs with a particular style. It’s fresh, creative and is designed with the client/end project in mind.
All the designs feel as if they have had great thought and research put into it in order to give the design a perfect fit for the content that will be going on the target website.
Not all of us take the time to research fully after an initial web design brief and I think this is what sets a good web designer apart from a great web designer. Taking the time to research the industry and matching it to the relevant content that the website will house puts the icing on the cake.
Take a look at the examples below and visit splendidsparrow.com for more of Teresa’s blog design. You can FEEL the love that has been put into these design!
Great website effects that dont require flash
A lot of my clients ask for Flash to be part of their website. Most of the time what they want is just some simple movement and image cycling.
Flash is a great tool, but in my eyes it should be used for what sets it apart from other tools on the Internet. Video, Web Applications and animation. There are other tools that do a great job at the above mentioned but I like to use flash for those jobs.
The biggest failure for flash is its now been slugged with a platform issue. Apple has made its point loud and clear and for a lot of web designers and developers its a great turning point being able to direct their clients away from using flash for “header” style effects in their website.
This is not the end of the world, in fact I see it as a great win for SEO and optimisation of website code and content.
Below is a collection of non flash effects that can satisfy the needs of a client asking for “flash” on their website.
1: Header Scroller + Reflection Read the rest of this entry »
By using the reflection plug-in and then scrolling/fading the container div you get a nice transition effect.
View Demo
Cartoon Inspired Website Design
Most of us only get to design websites for the corporate world. This usually means clean cut designs with solid navigation and a flow of predictable information and product data. I know all of us would like to let loose and do some creative design and for the cartoon lovers out there here is some inspiration for when the time comes!
These are a pick of what I think are great examples of cartoon inspired artistic websites that function great!
Using @font-face CSS3 in your website
With CSS3 @font-face available in most browsers, and with more and more Open Type (otf) fonts becoming available I thought it would be a good idea to give you a rough idea of how to implement a custom font, and also show you some fine examples.
In case your thinking “why would I want to use non standard fonts?”, then just think of those of us who have been using the same handful of fonts on every website for the last 10+ years! The addition of some extra style without having to use JavaScript replacement techniques or image replacements means better SEO and also less maintenance in the long term.
So all you need to do is get yourself a free Open Type font like the ones in our CSS3 Fonts section, and use the following code to embed it into your style sheet:
Read the rest of this entry »