Bits of Design Inspiration
Tuesday June 27, 2006 / 13 CommentsFor some time now, I’ve been capturing small bits of design inspiration locally on my computer. The idea came out of the problem that looking at entire designs for inspiration quickly led to too many similiarities.
While I’ve started grouping reviews of design details on flickr, I took the next step today and went ahead and posted my folder full of inspirational design bits. I’ll continue to do this and tag them for my own use, but I thought I’d make sure it was public info for anybody else who was interested in an easy way to grab small pieces of inspiration. It’s a separate flickr account, garrettdimoncom. Enjoy.
Featured Stuff - Resources: Wireframes & Page Description Diagrames
Omnigraffle and Visio versions of the wireframe templates and stencils I use on all of my projects. There’s even a few examples included for good measure. More about Wireframe & Page Description Diagram Stencils and Templates
Nice. I’ve been collecting my own bits of inspiration and thinking about what to do with them. This is a good idea. Thanks.
Dale CruseIts like an online version of a scrap book that graphic designers usually keep. That’s actually a good idea, another use for flickr.
Chris GriffinI’ve been using Paparazzi for the last year or so to accomplish this. I find it funny that most of our inspirations are the same. Good design is good design I suppose.
The only problem that I have run in to so far is that my collection is growing so large I am going to need to start organizing all of them somehow. Hopefully there will be a good app or method for tagging them someway.
Also, the added benefit of capturing the whole page is that you have a nice archive of designs so when people update their designs you can still use it for inspiration.
JoshuaYah, saw that account today while browsing flickr. For those on PC/Firefox, Screengrab works well. I’ve been collecting these as well over here
Andy Budd has a collection sometime ago which seemed to disappear. Either he deleted the set or made it private. They were great.
Anyways, thanks for sharing Garrett.
Sherwin TechicoJust make sure you mark the screenshots as “may offend” else flickr might block your account to searches and such.…
dekayI have a rather big collection of pages in Firefox. I’m using the ScrapBook extension – and it takes you two clicks to backup a complete page with images/css/js. You can still look up the html code if you want to, and the archive is much smaller than on bitmaps.
But the screen pictures always look so damn cool, with font AA and nicely cropped. Thanks for sharing!
JanThat’s great!
I did something similar myself as a side project after reading your post from ages ago about clipping bits of websites instead of bookmarking the entire thing. Thought it was a good idea.
gordonbrander.com/galleriffic
Gordon BranderYou’ve got some great stuff here. Are the snippets of pages labeled somewhere as to where they came from, and I’m just missing it?
bethI like it! My initial quesiton is would it not be worthwhile having a source for each. If someone asks you for an example of a really good resgistration form there are no references to the good stuff you’ve captured. But on reflection this is better than one single example – many fragments of inspiration. Nice.
marc mcneillI have intentionally left references off because it makes it too tempting to draw too much inspiration from one place. I’ve found that this way works much better for me personally, so unfortunately I haven’t saved any references.
GarrettGreat idea to use Flickr to hold inspirato. You rock.
ericGreat collection. I saw a few familiar bits (I saved a few of the same “inspirational” pieces that you have). I was thinking of doing the same on a separate Flickr account not too long ago but feared that the account would be deleted. I thought I read somewhere that Flickr wasn’t too pleased with account users that used their streams for screenshots rather than photographs. My local folder is chocked full with hundreds of shots.
Derek PunsalanThat’s why I love this web2.0 thing so much. Everything is made with love, with care. Thinking of the user experience. Great collection.
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