Whenever I need to help design a website, an obvious idea comes to mind. Look around at the web, pick a few web site designs that we/I like, and use them for design inspiration.
This sounds easy, right?
And yet it almost never works. Why? Because the only sites that come to mind are really boring: cnn.com, bloglines.com, slashdot.org and freshmeat.net among others.
The reality is, most of the sites I spend the majority of my time on just aren't designed in any special way. Or, they may have a unique design which fits for them, but why would I want to be like them?
Then, a few weeks ago I came across the following site from LifeHacker:
From the name you might think that this website offers CSS templates or something like that for you to plug your website into. That's what I thought and was wrong. It turns out, this site doesn't have much to do with CSS (as far as I can tell, anyway).
This site turns out to be something much more valuable.
It's essentially a gallery, updated daily, of *designed* sites. I've been following it for some time, and sure enough, on a daily basis I now see 10+ websites that have an interesting look to them.
I'm excited to try using this on my next web design project. Instead of scratching my head, thinking of sites to use as models, I can just jump over to css-galleries.com and browse through hundreds of examples.
Finally, no more basing my design suggestions on slashdot.org.
--Ben
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