Inspiration Isn’t Found in a CSS Gallery
We have all heard of or been to a CSS gallery website. Their purpose is to showcase excellently designed websites and provide inspiration. While I respect their purpose to showcase otherwise unknown sites, their secondary purpose is flawed.
In actuality, CSS galleries do not provide us with real inspiration, they provide us with false inspiration. Whether CSS gallery owners know it or not, they are hurting us as designers.
CSS Galleries Kill Originality
CSS galleries try to provide us with inspiration, but reality is that most CSS galleries showcase websites that fit in with modern trends. With CSS galleries showing us only websites with modern trends, we get “inspired” and create websites that follow the same trends. This kills any originality that websites can possess because we, as designers, do not allow ourselves to think outside of the box. We contain ourselves in the box of clean gradients and gloss.
Website designers are not meant to stay in the box. We are suppose to think outside of the box with our websites and make an impact, but with our only inspiration and guidance coming with CSS galleries, we simply do not know other ways to create websites then by following trends.
Go Outside for Real Inspiration
But you depend on those galleries for inspiration right? Wrong. You don’t have to depend on those galleries anymore. You can look at them and admire the websites featured, but do not look to them as a source of inspiration anymore.
The first thing you should look to is what’s right outside your front door. Nature. I may just sound like a Hippy, but nature is the greatest source of inspiration you can see. The difference between nature and CSS galleries is nature isn’t biased. Nature won’t force you to see modern trends, nature will allow you to explore and see everything within it.
If nature isn’t your thing, then that’s no problem either. There are many alternatives. Open a book. Whether it’s a comic book or a novel, the images or imagery of the book can be an amazing source of inspiration. You can even look at your clothing and find inspiration. Look at what styles of clothes would work for a website. There are millions of places offline that can inspire you to create an amazing.
Think outside of the box and you will create a website that’s better than any website found in a CSS gallery.
Great article Nicole, what you said is really true. I being a designer myself has seen many sites similar to another website. Simply because they say that they follow the trend doesn’t mean that you should be copying what another website has done.
Hope this opens the eye of some
Looking forward for more articles like this from you.
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Nicole Foster Reply:
September 3rd, 2010 at 7:44 AM
Thanks for the support! I hope CSS galleries lose popularity or somehow learn how to not encourage designers to copy. CSS galleries psychologically do it without even realizing it.
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