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home > Tips & Tutorials > GRAPHIC DESIGN INSPIRATION - DESIGN SAMPLES

GRAPHIC DESIGN INSPIRATION & IDEAS : BEST OF THE BEST WEB SITES & LAYOUTS

LOGO DESIGN INSPIRATION
WEB DESIGN INSPIRATION

SPOTLIGHT GRAPHIC DESIGNERS FROM OUR DESIGN COMMUNITY

PRINT / GRAPHIC DESIGN INSPIRATION
BROWSE AWARD-WINNING GRAPHIC DESIGNERS FOR INSPIRATION
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List of 180+ of the Best Design Inspiration Showcases - This is a list that boasts 180+ design inspiration sites.

LOGO DESIGN INSPIRATION AND LOGO DESIGN IDEAS

Coolest Business Card Designs, Part I - Here are the coolest, most innovative business cards that you have ever seen. Here is Part II.

Free LogoTypes - This web site provides you with an opportunity to discover the world of logos, brands and trademarks. However, besides being just a resource for "logotype fans", the site is of a specific importance for designers and design studios that are involved in the logotype creation themselves.

Good Logo - This site is dedicated to the artform of the logo and its accompanied corporate identity.

Go Promos - Our stock logos are listed alphabetically so you can easily find your company or organization's image.

Logo Blog : 56 Most Inspirational Logo Designs - Logos are one of the most creative elements of graphic art. These creative logos have a tendency to not only provide brands with essential recognition, but also ensure its success. In order to recognize the creativity behind these artistic visual identities, we at LogoBlog, have listed some of the best creative logos (though it’s not a ranking) in a random way. We hope that you will appreciate these creative logos as much as we do.

Logo Pond - Logo Pond is a great site for logo inspiration. You will just love this one.

Logo in Process - Watch a logo being designed and learn from the process.

Logomarket.com - designers present their designs to an interested public and to potential customers. The showcases contain both closed commissioned work and designs for sale at an attractive fixed price.

Logo Sauce - Gallery oozing with logo goodness. Find the best logos and find some good ideas of your own.

Logotypes Russia - More than 5000 logos available in EPS and Vector graphics. You need to impress creative director at agency X tomorrow. You think of a great campaign for their client X. You need the logo - and you need it now... Start looking here.

Logotypes - Archive of Logos.

Satlogo.com - The world's radio & television channel logotypes and logotypes of satellite related entities.

WEB DESIGN INSPIRATION AND WEB DESIGN IDEAS

Banner Blog - Banner Blog started in June 2005 to showcase online advertising, much of which goes unnoticed. It was also seen as a good opportunity to pimp our own work too!

Beautifully - Web design inspiration gallery with start base of thumbnails.

Best Designs - Best of the Best in Web Design

Best Web Gallery - Best Web Gallery is an inspirational gallery site where we collect a wide range of quality design websites (Flash & CSS).

Brain Fuel - A portal of inspirational and design resources

Coolest Designs -The best web sites directory

Cool Home Pages - The most popular portal to sites with exceptional website design.

Cool Websites - A gallery of the coolest websites.

CSS Based - CSS Based is a project providing web designers a gallery of well designed CSS-based websites from all around the world.

CSS Beauty - A gallery of beautiful designs on the CSS Beauty resources site.

CSS Bloom - A blog style CSS gallery.

CSS Collection - Gallery of naked sites, shed your tables and run free.

CSS Demo - A Spanish gallery of sites designed in CSS.

CSS Drive - Categorized CSS gallery with examples.

CSS Dump - A CSS web design gallery.

CSS Elite - One of the best CSS web site design galleries out there.

CSS Glance - CssGlance is the first italian website focused on providing its audience with a database of well designed and innovative CSS based websites from all around the world.

CSS Hazard - Showcase of the best of CSS web site designs.

CSS Heaven - Web design gallery for inspiration.

CSS Import - Yes, another CSS web design gallery.

CSS Liquid - Resisting Fascist design.

CSS Love - CSS blog and inspirational gallery.

CSS Princess - A site promoting female designers and showcasing their works.

CSS Vault - This site is useful for me as a designer and I hope that it is useful for you whether you are a designer, developer, programmer, manager, or just a CSS advocate.

CSS Reboot - he CSS Reboot is a community event for web professionals and enthusiasts. Every November 1st and May 1st at 18:00 GMT, Rebooters from all over the world launch their standards based website redesigns simultaneously; bringing traffic, interest and a little respect to their sites.

CSS Remix - A fresh blend of the best CSS Designs in Web Design.

CSS Showcase - A gallery of CSS menus and tabs.

CSS Tux - The best dressed sites on the web.

CSS Website - Css Website is an innovative gallery of simple websites. Its purpose is to showcase designer’s work and to expand the CSS design community. We propose a classification by color and contents for a better usability.

CSS Zen Garden - A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design.

Daily Slurp - A dialy list of beautiful sites.

Design Crush - Web design inspirational portal.

Design Diary - An archived gallery of web art and design.

Design in Europe - A gallery of the most beautiful web sites in Europe.

Design Eye - DarkEye is a new breed of ‘living’ web design showcase. Browse thousands of custom web designs from designers around the globe. Rank and add comments on any design, then create a gallery of your favorites.

Design Licks - A showcase of some of the best web designs from around the world.

Design Melt Down - Great designs listed beside many great articles for better designs. Great resource for any web designer..

Digital Refueler - Your daily portion for creative inspiration.

Design Shack - A site offering the cream of great design, filtering through lots of the redesigns that occur every day across the Internet, and cataloging the greatest projects out there.

Digital Thread - Take a look at only the best of the best web site design firms.

Doble Pixel - Cool sites on the net (in Spanish but you don't need the words).

Dreamer - Inspirations for the Mind. Portal of design inspiration.

Email Design Gallery - The Campaign Monitor email design gallery highlights the amazing email designs being sent by our talented customers each and every day. Clever aren't they!

Favorite Web Sites Awards - Look no further than the FWA to find the best of designs to inspire you.

FaveUp - Design inspiration gallery.

Flickr Web Design Inspiration - A set of web design sites to get inspiration from on Flickr

Fcukstar Awards - Find inspiration on this design awards site.

Inspiration King - A site organizing the best web site designs in the world.

iStockPhoto Design of the Week Spotlight - This a great source of inspiration - they have these great designs listed in different categories including one for web design.

Light on Dark Sites - Enjoy sites that are on the darker side.

Misspato - Directory of Inspiring Web Sites.

Modern Day Billboard - Modern Day Billboard is a site that provides you with some of today's most creative and inspiring websites on the internet. The styles you'll see shall vary from different types of medium... CSS, AJAX, Tables, Flash, or Old school Frames as well as many others. Enjoy our site and if you have a creative site then submit it below. Thanks!

Moluv - The best of the best, if you will. These sites are all beautiful, innovative, functional, and consistent.

Most Inspirational Designs - Most Inspired aggregates designs from all the popular css and design galleries.

Newstoday - Awesome site for new and great work.

No Limit Media - A collection of the best designs on the Web

One Star Gallery - A new inspirational gallery for designers.

Piepmatzel - A unique gallery of beautiful websites...a gallery is filled with clickable thumnails of beautiful sites.

Plastic Pilots - Plasticpilots.com assigns awards to web sites featuring excellent design.

Screenalicious - One of the biggest web design inspirational galleries out there.

Screen Fluent - Zeitgeist of screen design.

Showcase Point - On PortfolioBase, you can see fellow portfolios from your industry, see how others have used that color that you like so much, see portfolios from your own country, and much much more.

Smashing Magazine Lists - Smashing magazine has great lists of inspirational designs including 50 Beautiful CSS-Based Designs in 2006 ... 70 Expert CSS Ideas ... 60 Elegant & Appealing Designs ... 50 Beautifuul Web Designs ... 50 Simple Web Designs ... 45 Excellent Blog Designs ... 45 Fresh and Clean Designs ... 30 Dark Designs ... 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You Probably Haven't Seen ...and more.

Style Boost - Showcasing outstanding web sites.

Style Crunch - StyleCrunch is a css and standards websites gallery, you can find the best sites in the www, best design, best coded and what engine used.

Style Gala - A nice collection of beautiful web designs.

The Best Designs - A gallery of the best of CSS and web design.

The Dezine - There is a major difference between this inspiration gallery and the other galleries. This gallery is not just web oriented and definitely not tableless-standard-compliant web oriented. This gallery is design and innovation oriented. But besides the good looks, I will also count the innovative approach, usability and functionality.

Unmatched Style - Web design and CSS inspiration gallery in blog format.

Visual Designer - Another Inspiration portal - Find inspiration for your next design project.

W3C Sites - W3C Sites is a collection of web sites created by designers that conform with the W3C standards.

Web Creme - Best of the best web designs featured in this web design inspiration blog.

WebDigity -WebDigity is a css Gallery where all the best designs are displayed and new ones can be displayed. It has a forumn for interaction with its members.

Web Design Gallery - Inspire yourself to design better.

Web Standards Awards - See all of the winners of the Web Standard Awards.

Well Done Sites - Web design CSS gallery using Web 2.0.

PRINT COLLECTIONS - GRAPHIC DESIGN INSPIRATION & IDEAS

Coolest Business Card Designs, Part I - Here are the coolest, most innovative business cards that you have ever seen. Here is Part II.

Best of Brochure Design : Cool Brochures - These brochures will give you some artistic inspiration when you feel like you are out of ideas. I hope that you enjoy the

Cool Designs for Flyers and Posters - Some of these flyers have cool textures, shapes, and some are even 3d-like.

Ad Classix - Vintage ads offer a fascinating glimpse of history and represent the archival documents of our consumer driven society. If you own a vintage or show vehicle, a print of its original publicity advertisement is the finishing touch to your investment.

Adobe Kuler - On Adobe Kuler you can browse and share color combinations from other designers.

Ads of the World - Ads of the World is an advertising archive and community showcasing the best and most interesting work worldwide.

ABC Typography - A virtual museum of typography.

Ad Week - Spotlight of the best creative ads. There are also a lot of helpful articles here.

ArtzMania - An art showcase from global designers. Get your creative juices flowing with this one.

Album Cover and Album Art - Flickr Collections of album cover designs and album art.

Best Rejected Advertising - A great idea for a site. Best Rejected Advertising was the first book to publish ads that had been rejected by clients on aesthetic, commercial or strategic grounds. This website broadens the original concept by including rejected, banned, spoof and most complained about ads and commercials.

Cary Graphic Arts Collection - Graphic arts library and digital image database.

CD Design - Creative Music (CDs and Albums) artwork and designs.

Cover Boom - See the most beautiful book cover designs.

Daily Input - A new blog about inspiration for graphic designers.

Design Archive Online - Review twentieth century magazine design and photography with biographical profiles of designers. A project of the Rochester Institute of Technology, the image archives have limited access.

Design Snips - A collection of snips of great designs.

DFCKR - DFCKR keeps tabs on designs on Flickr. This includes 28 wonderful inspirational photo pools found on Flickr which could be of some use to those looking for some inspiration including Magazine covers, Book covers, Posters, Typography and Lettering, One Letter (Typography), Vintage Advertisements, Illustrations, Vintage Illustrations, Vintage Christmas Designs and Art, Drawings, Sketches, Moleskine Art, Visual Scavenger Hunt, Art after Art, Pop Art, Graffiti Archeology, Contemporary Arts, Street Art, Retro Records, Retro Kid, T-shirt Revolution, Screen-printing, Post-it Ar, Paper Fetish, Graphic Designm Logos, and Character Design.

DimeStore Packaging - A gallery site featuring vintage dime store packaging.

Form Fifty Five - FormFiftyFive is a independent online archive of inspiring work in graphic design, illustration, photography, architecture, web and product design.

Graphic Arts - The Senate maintains a collection of over 900 historical prints and engravings. This collection contains a rich array of 19th and early 20th century images portraying the events, people, and settings of the U.S. Senate.

Graphic Design Archive Online - 20th Century Editorial Online Design Archive

Hand Format - Need more CD packaging design inspiration, then you cannot afford to miss this site.

Imaginary World - Archive of design packaging including cereal boxes, Food Packaging, Store Displays, Premiums, Newspaper Ads, and much more from 1950s-1970s,

iStockPhoto Design of the Week Spotlight - This a great source of inspiration - they have these great designs listed in different categories for ease of use including Advertisements, Annual Reports, Branding, Campaigns, CDs / DVDs, Covers, Editorial Magazine, POP, Poster, Product Packaging, Self Promotion, Video / Television, and the Web.

Kunst - The print collection contains prints and other art on paper, i.e. drawings, engravings, woodcuts within and relating to the subjects addressed by the Library.

Library of Congress Print Collections - Collections of prints

Medicine and Madison Avenue - This website explores the complex relationships between modern medicine and modern advertising, or "Madison Avenue," as the latter is colloquially termed.

NY Public Library - The New York Public Library encompasses a specialized reference collection of over 15,000 volumes on the history of prints and printmakers; artist clipping files; and a collection of close to 200,000 original prints.

Off the Shelf - A Japanese packaging design scrapbook.

Old Ads - Old advertisements from the 60's, 70's, and 80's

PDF Mag - pdf-mags.com is your infobase for PDF magazines made all over the world.

Pharmaceutical Designs - Beautiful Pharmaceutical designs from the 60s and 70s.

Phirebrush - Phirebrush is an online magazine (art group if you want) that displays user submissions in monthly issues. These submissions showcase visitor submitted artwork, photography, music, desktop wallpapers and writings of various styles. Unlike most art groups and e-zines, we let ANYONE submit, trying to showcase both the famous and beginners, giving everyone a voice and a chance in the spotlight.

Posters American Style - View major posters from the last century. Learn about their design, printing and historical impact on culture. Includes audio. Collection by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Progress PKG - You can find a variety of creative packaging designs in here, from CD packs to metal packaging. A very creative company who aim to be market leaders in the field of creative packaging.

Propoganda Posters - Over 200 political posters from years back.

RBird - A series of professional observations about package design practices within specific product categories

Swiss Posters - Take a look through The Carnegie Mellon University's Swiss Poster Collection exhibit

The Art of Poster - Contains 5000 images and descriptions of posters.

The Die Line - The main source of packaging design inspiration. According to the webmaster Andrew Gibbs, he started theDieLine because as a packaging designer, he needs resources for research and inspiration. But he found none, so he set this site up dedicated to creative packaging design.

Tons of Conert Posters for Inspiration - We all like a little inspiration sometimes, and we all need some sometimes too. I like browsing concert posters or “informational art” as I like to call it. Pretty much anything goes in the world of poster art, so you never know what to expect (which is great) and it’s an area of the art/design world that is very rich on the visual side, not to mention the creative type treatments.

Tribu-Design - More than 900 designers and manufacturers... you can choose your browsing : Timeline, Designers or Manufacturers or go directly to the last added section.

Vintage Packaging Collection on Flickr - Take a look at these vintage packaging images on Flickr.

World of Spectrum - The official world archive for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the largest on-line gaming center on the Internet

Other Sources of Design Inspiration

3DM3 Computer Graphics Gallery - A gallery of 3D designs that might strike up some ideas.

Ad Generator - The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans.

Apps Mania - The best of application designs.

Apple Brochure and Ads - Here is a gallery of all of the Apple Ads and brochures.

A Source of Inspiration - Ideas on advertising, creativity, online marketing and the web brought to you by Armando Alves, a Interactive Ninja from Portugal.

Boonika - A mashup of different types of art and designs. Some are too funky for my taste, but some are quite good.

Brusheezy - Cool Photoshop brushes with cool vector patterns that are great for inspiration.

ColourLovers - ColourLovers is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

Computer Love - Computer love has a nice gallery of great designs.

Design Flood - A digg-like site where designers can vote designs either up or down.

Cool Hunter - Find inspiration on the Cool Hunter...all types of designs here.

Design Inspiration - A place to introduce talented illustrators and designers to other creative professionals in their industry. A forum for old and new talent, a venue to be seen and noted. We hope that your time spent here will prove to be both stimulating and inspirational.

Design is Kinky - One of the old timers...it has been around forever and enjoyed by many designers. There are many inspirational designs that they display.

Design You Trust - A design inspiration site.

Desktopography - Desktopography is an exhibition, a showcase of nature themed wallpapers created by designers worldwide.

Deviant Art - Deviant art is the largest design community out there and they have a huge gallery of designs to browse through in both print design and web design.

Digital Artist - Always a good source of design inspiration.

Einbahn Studio Blog - A blog filled with inspirational designs from all design genres.

From Europe - Inspirational spotlight of the best designs coming from Europe.

Gaga Over Web Buttons - Great button designs list.

Icon Base - Here you´ll find the best icons from the best artists in the world. The icons here listed belong to the individual authors and companies. They are free for personal and non commercial use. If you are an icon artist and desire to share your work with the world, this is your place. Icons can help with ideas sometimes.

Icon Buffet - This site is a collection of beautiful web icons and could be inspirational.

Icon Factory - Get some ideas for your icons or base your designs on the icons that you find.

JPG Magazine - A place for people to share photos....there are a lot of very inspirational photos here.

LCSV4 (The Little Chimp Society) - Find some very inspirational illustrations to get your creative design juices flowing.

Moco Loco - A magazine that features the best of contemporary design.

Mojizu- A character design community that could strike up some inspiration.

More Inspiration - Browse design innovations to spark your creativity.

Net Diver - An online dezine ezine that features mixtures of different inspirational designs.

New Web Pick - An online design magazine that has a lot of inspirational design goodness.

Portfolio Base - A gallery of portfolios from around the world.

ProWebArt - ProWebArt is web design gallery where we collect the most inspirational and quality web designs. The main goal of ProWebArt is to put in one place the best websites world wide.

Reset Blog - A blog filled with inspirational designs and art.

Start Drawing - Wow! This is what you are going to say when you get on this site - the colors are so vibrant that right away I am thinking about the color combinations that are used.

StashMedia - An online multimedia design magazine that showcases the best in multimedia design.

Sugar Frosted Goodness - These illustrations and designs should give you some ideas.

TheDreamer - Thedreamer is a simple inspiracional catalogue, where some works are selected and divided in categories. You can interact with TheDreamer sending your inspiration in the fields below, it will be evaluated and could be added in the data base TheDreamer.

The Serif - Your daily dose of design inspiration.

Threadless T-Shirts - Browse through these clever tshirts and you will see design elements in some of them that will bring you inspiration.

Veer - Veer has some very inspirational wallpapers that really have an inspirational effect on many designers. Take a look.

We Are Sharks - We are sharks, we never stop swimming for inspirational designs.

Logo Design Creation Process from Start to Finish by Expert Graphic Designer - Mark Misenheimer
This article was written by the very talented, Mark Misenheimer of Misenheimer Creative, Inc. Mark is an expert freelance graphic designer who has been in the design business for years. He has documented the design of a logo from start to finish in order to help other graphic designers. I know that you will learn something from this tremendous logo design article.

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Jul 17

Getting a Handle on the Creative Process for Graphic Designers
The Graphic Design industry is very competitive, and trust me, it can certainly get stressful and frustrating at times. However, it doesn?t always have to be that way. Here, I have broken down my design process. This is how I create my design layouts from start to finish. Basically, with some focus, structure, and a little bit of talent, creating rewarding and professional design work can be produced more efficiently and with less stress.

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Jul 5

20 Ways to Avoid Graphic Designer?s Block
As a designer everyone has experienced a point where they just can no longer think of anything worth while. It?s in these situations when you have to reevaluate your perception of what works and what doesn?t. Use the following 20 tips to avoid and get through a tough designer's block.

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Jun 18

Free Online Font Tools - Mega List of Web Based Font, Text, & Type Tools
Graphic Design and Typography are deeply connected. For that reason, I figure that most of you are going to love these free online font and type tools. Most, if not all, of these are very useful and I recommend that you use them when you have a chance. Below you will find the huge list of free browser-based font and type tools.

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Jun 13

List of Graphic Design Podcasts on Topics Graphic Design, Web Design, Typography and More
I have found a load of design related podcasts that I am sure will peak your interests. Just think of it as radio shows geared towards you and your love of design. You will even find Podcasts on Photoshop, Illustrator, Typography, Freelancing, as well as Web Design and Graphic Design.

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Jun 7

List of Vector Conversion Software - 30+ Tools to Turn Photos into Line Art and Illustrations
I love Vector Magic, a free online vectorization tool. It is a really cool browser-based tool that can be used to turn a photograph into an illustration. It doesn't always succeed in getting that look that you might be looking for, but it does a pretty good job. I usually just use it to play around with photos to see what Vector Magic can do with it, but it also can be very useful if you want to convert a photo into an illustration. I started to wonder how many other vectorization tools and software packages there were out there and I was surprised to find out that there are a ton o them. Basically, most of these tools turn Raster / Bitmap / Photo Images into Line Art / Illustrations / Vector Art.

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May 28

Free Photoshop Shapes Downloads - Mega List of Free Custom Vector Shapes for Adobe Photoshop - Part I
I am in love with vector shapes right now. I think they are so handy to have around when you are building a site. The way that you can stretch vectors without creating jaggy edges, makes them incredibly useful. Most of the time I just land up breaking them apart to use a curve that I like. I also love using them for as badges or buttons on web sites. I have collected a huge selection of free custom Photoshop shapes. If you download every single one of these, there are probably close to 15,000 free Adobe Photoshop shapes. There are more to come in Part II. Enjoy.

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May 27

A New and More Accurate Search Engine for Finding Free Clipart
As graphic designers, we are always on the hunt for quality free clipart images to use in our designs. The problem is that often searching for clipart often brings back very inaccurate search results. Well, thanks to one of my friends, I have found a new site called Find Free Clipart which will make my life much easier the next time I search for clipart online.

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May 20

Become a Graphic Designer - Design Careers & Design Education Advice from Professional Designer
Whether you?re right out of high school, a Mom looking for a career she can do from home, recently out of the Military or simply someone who feels they have a knack for design and is ready for a career change, consider that you have a few options on how to gain the skills you will need to pursue your dream job. But first, ask yourself some questions

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May 16

Online Drawing Tools & Free Online Painting & Sketching Tools
As Graphic Designers, we are all creative individuals. I thought that most of you would love to know about all of the fantastic online drawing and painting tools that are available online. Not only are they fun, but they are also quite useful for sketching out some of our ideas. Some of these tools can also be used as design collaboration tools to use with your co-workers, clients, friends, teachers, and family. Enjoy and don't hesitate to send me links to online drawing tools that I might have missed.

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