This week's Design and Usability Tactics e-newsletter offers suggestions on where to find creativity inspiration. What inspires you to be creative when you design? What resources do you turn to when you have a creativity block?
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I'm in the business of producing material for print and web. So when I need a little inspirational boost, I go to a few sites that have an outstanding volume of pieces for me to review.
Please post a response if you can offer suggestions to this reader:
"I am on a BIG task. That is to learn Dreamweaver MX and make an Ecommerce site. Would like your good solid recommendation on a site or sites that I can get creative ideas fromlike you did for the PSD sites. - Jim"
It depends on what your looking for. I'm in the same boat of developing a few different pieces for our company website, but I lack the programming knowledge to really attack the task without a huge learning curve.
I turn to the above options for this reason. Dreamweaver Exchange on the Macromedia site (www.macromedia.com) would be a could place to start. It has various extensions that help ease the process of development...a few of them are even free.
You also have the option of implementing an already developed package. You can download quite a few packages from www.hotscripts.com. They range from good to bad and from free to expensive. I recommend osCommerce for PHP/MySQL.
We received these design resource suggestions from a reader via e-mail:
It's not a totally Adobe world yet. There is also the Corel part of the planet to consider. They have a great deal of resource material online at corel.com under the solutions selection.
Another place for inspiration akin to coolhomepages.com is "cool site of the day" (csotd.com) though not all cool sites are great designs. Some are just great ideas for a site, a product, a service, or a place to visit. (Note: You should have something akin to Zone Labs Zone alarm firewall protection if you go onto the site for CoolSiteOfTheDay.)
This is a particularly poignant topic for me. I'm at the point where I bounce easily from one language to another, one design paradigm to another, one management style to another - but don't have any good projects at hand.
It's like I have this great vocabulary... and nothing to say.
A few other sites that I use to find design inspiration include:
www.visualdesigner.net Similar to coolhomepages, with sites organized by type, with a thumbnail view of each and a rating.
www.howdesign.com/links/ HOW design in general is a great design magazine and resource, but their link section is especially useful. Check out the "Creativity" and "Design inspiration" links.
consider the motherboard then a daughterboard and on both sides of the daughter various cards cga ega mono and color laguagecards memorycards rllcards idecards s100bustranslatorcards coprocessorcards serialcards parallelcards i wanted a basiccard that was like TIbasic for the99/4a floppydrivecontrollercards tapedrive controllercards I SENT A LETTER TO A ENGINEERING COMPANY THAT WAS DOING CUSTOM BOARDS "COULD YOU ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS IF THEY WOULD ME USE AND/OR MODIFY THEIR DESIGNS TO PRODUCE THE SKETCH THAT I SENT ?" they sent it back and said none of their customers would allow my request ! HOW MANY HOBBYISTS IN THE 1980'S DID THE SAME THING ? OR SIMILAR THING ?
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Design creativity inspiration
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