The Smashing Idea Book: From Inspiration to Application

Chapter 4: Other Designs

Websites aren’t the only designs to draw inspiration from. There’s a whole world of other designs out there that can be drawn upon to inspire your projects. Everything from graphic design to architecture to product design can be studied for new perspective on tackling age-old design challenges.

Just taking a look around your workspace or out your office window is likely to offer up dozens of potential sources of inspiration, if you’ll only learn to look at things that way. Everything from the color of something to the shape of it can inspire you. The way the sunlight glints off a surface can be just as inspiring as looking at a website similar to the one you’re trying to design (if not more so).

One of the greatest things about more indirect inspiration like the examples here is that you can show the same images or objects to ten different designers and you’ll likely get ten very different interpretations, some of which would bear little resemblance to the original inspiration. The same can’t generally be said for website designs that serve as inspiration.

Graphic Design

The world of graphic design has at least as much variation as web design, and has been around a lot longer. Print design alone has a varied history that spans back to the invention of the printing press, invented by Johann Gutenberg around 1440. Just studying designs from the past century could give you enough potential inspiration to last your entire career.

Consider looking at print ...