Design-Notes » Inspiration

Weekly Inspiration: Best News Websites

alexandra — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:57:14 +0000

For this week’s inspiration, I gathered some of the best news sites’ design. My personal favorites are BNET and BBC. BNET gives each category different background images while BBC allows you to customize home page content (a bit like iGoogle).

If we take a closer look, it is not hard to find some common designs among these sites. Somethings we could learn from the pros !

Narrow header no more than 200px
300x 300 ad space at right hand side
Big font headline
Image slider

BNET

Business Week

The Wall Street Journal

ESPN

Goal.com

CNBC

National Geographic

CNN

BBC

Fox news

msnbc

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11 Inspirational Twitter Background Designs

alexandra — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:56:45 +0000

Twitter is no doubt surprisingly successful. Here I collected 11 beautiful twitter backgrounds as part of my research on a recent project. Hope you like them! If you think your twitter background is GREAT, send me a link!

Creative nerds

g_obieta

farrhad

kimdeanart

AdamCarn

colourofair

napwarden

mikakiviranta

fragments77

thinkgeek

marekuk

grantclark

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Weekly inspiration: Nicely Designed University Websites

alexandra — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:17:51 +0000

University websites are usually not so interesting. The ones I chose here are some top universities and they have been taking their web designs seriously. Different designs send out different messages. Top schools have to have a serious look while art schools remonstrate their creativity into the design. Hope you like them and when you have a similar project, you know where to look.

Harvard University

Red and black alsways go well with each other. Smart and serious is the look of Harvard.

Boston University

Boston University used an accordion to hold essential contents including: video and galleries. This fancy accordion is created with flash. I also found this tutorial on doing this with CS3

University of Sydney used same technology

MIT

Famous for their innovations, MIT’s web site is also interesting. The background image and color is different everyday, and the content cleverly avoid blocking the image.

MIT gives different sections freedom to display their concepts properly.

The NEW school

It is about learning and having fun. New school’s design is simple and modern.

University of Connecticut

Blue is a popular color among universities and institutions but few of them have good designs. University of Connecticut’s design was certainly considered and executed carefully.

Oxford

Same with the sample above. Oxford used navy blue with white text. However, it looks a bit heavy to me.

Princeton

Another minimalism design with classic Princeton color – orange. By using the same orange on buttons, bullet images and links the designer cleverly incorporated the brand into the design

Stanford

Being one of the most famous university, Stanford’s website used slimbox and carousel to display their culture vividly.

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Weekly Inspiration: Use Your Own Figure on Website Design

alexandra — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 03:26:06 +0000

Thinking about using your own picture for your websites? It is a great idea for branding. People tend to trust you more when they know what you look like, and a picture worth a thousand words. However there is a risk that you site could look boring. Let’s check out some sites for inspiration today and hopefully you will find your way around this kind of projects.

Lutoslawski Piano Duo

For artists and musicians, it is common to use their photos on their website, so the design has to be impressive.

truedentistry

Backdrops using people’s photo is not commonly used, cause your content could be blocking the photo and the photo could distract reader. However, this site still looks pretty good

sethsaid

Strong color contrast is used here to emphasize his “big brain”

cpeople

emilianorodriguez

joshtilton

Trace the photo with vector could look pretty good

fornaldesign

contrast

jasonreedwebdesign

ayushsaran

FrankWalter

This backdrop photo re-sizes automatically according to your browser size. Its a clever design.

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12 Beautiful Typography Desktop Wallpapers

alexandra — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:34:25 +0000

Love typography?

Here we have some of the best typography desktop wallpapers for you inspiration and entertainment. Enjoy!

Rome3

ilovetypography

NoTypeNoLife

Trust your instincts

The Beauty of typography

ilovetypography

typography on a hill

typography worldmap

typographic rain

abc123

love you

FeelingBlue?

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Online Shop Design Inspiration Part 2-Minimalism

alexandra — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:42:00 +0000

This is the second part of online shop design inspirations. This time we focus on minimalism. Minimalism helps people focus on the product and content, therefore it has been widely used for all kins of products from tee-shirts to furniture. Here we have 11 examples for your inspiration.

13 Corporate Style Web Design Inspiration
Weekly inspiration Best Online Shop Designs

nike

esfootwear

cafepress

vitradirect

debruidsschat

waterstones

etnies

mycacties

lushpad

designbyhumans

vitsoe

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Weekly inspiration – 17 beautiful flash websites

alexandra — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:05:08 +0000

For this week’s inspiration post, I get you 17 amazingly made flash sites. It seems to me that flash sites aren’t popular anymore, because of all the disadvantages like seo, loading time etc. However, if you need your sites to have fancy computer game like effect, flash is still the only choice. The examples below are built by some of the best designers and agencies. They are really worth checking out.

originalsource

This one is my favorite in the list. If there is a place in the world looks like this one. I gonna spend rest of my life there.

agencynet

For those play Sims this site should look familiar, right?

piotrowskimichal

multiadaptor

recycledlifeforms

xixinobanho

emiliechollat

magnivate

pegadaecologica

mariafilo

ff0000

pgo

wesc

jam3media

moodbuilder

caravanpictures

thibaud

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Stunning 3D Desktop Wallpapers

alexandra — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:50:24 +0000

I fall in love with 3D lately and start to play with cinema 4D, so I got some really beautiful 3D desktop wallpapers for inspiration and hope to learn from the best. Here they are, hope they can decorate your desktop too.