As a web designer, I mainly spend my time looking for other people’s well implemented design ideas and then re-purposing them for my own sites.
The process for this is generally quite simple, first I hit up A List Apart and see what they’re saying about a certain topic (Search forms, knowledge hubs, widgets, etc). Even if the article there is a few years old, the quality of the writing and the theory behind the implementation is still strong. Then it’s on to Smashing Magazine, which usually has something either a bit more technical, or a nice listicle for ideas to steal.
If by this point, much like Bono, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, it’s straight onto Google, where the searches become increasingly desperate, where X = Whatever needs ‘designing’, eg Search forms
- Well designed X’s
- Good X’s
- Nice X’s
- X’s that aren’t shit.