Inspiration

I look nearly everywhere for inspiration.

For layouts of large text I look at books/magazines and their covers, food produce covers, newspapers, instruction manuals, etc.

For logos and symbols, I look at warning/road signs and other logos.

For applications of design techniques, you can't beat adverts (both printed and televised).

I usually try to come up with a theme for my sites. This depends on the kind of info I have on the subject of the site.

E.g. if I have nothing but the colours I'm supposed to use for the site, then I'd make a generic design that works well with the colours.

If the subject is quite specific, like say a computer/techy-ish site, then I would draw inspiration from things related to computers like hardware and parts.

For me, going through the design development process, I usually end up with a design and layout that looks totally different to original plans.

I'm a bit the same, adverts, junk mail, store fronts, cafes, brochures ...

but having a theme or product helps as it gives guide lines to kind of lead you. then again, like my html site, its techy but am trying to keep it basic and simple and since I have a lot of graphic samples am trying to stick with basic colour, will probably change it again once I get that "great idea"

As I often say in critiques, a design should always be appropriate for the subject matter. So I usually do some free-association sort of thinking to get to design concepts from the site topic.

For example, i posted a site I recently designed for something called the Internationl Tobacco Policy Survey. Now, the client didn't want it to look too tobacco-ish, so I tried to abstract from that idea enough so that it was still smoking-inspirred but not obviously so. This was my first attempt. However, I really thought that the client would like something a little more corporate looking, so my next prototype brought in the blues.

The client didn't seem particularly keen on either of those, so I ended up going back to the drawing board. Problem was, what kind of imagery do you come up with for this sort of subject matter? The client wanted some sort of international theme going on, with a world or globe type of image, so I went with that first. After an extensive search for appropriate globe images in eps format and losts of time in Illustrator, I came up with nothing good. So, finally, I was frustrated enough to just cut the crap and go with something simple - the four countries involved are Canada, Australia, Britain, and the US which all happen to have some combination of red, white, and blue in their designs. So that's what I ended up doing - red, white, and blue scheme with a flag-shaped rectangles for the logo. Unfortunately the final mock-up seems to have disappeared from the server so I'll have to post it again tomorrow.

Oh, and a lot of the other design concepts I used came from a site the client showed me to give me an idea of what he wanted. This was a difficult client because he didn't seem to have any clear ideas of what he did and did not want.