 Finding the right design inspirations for your design project is an essential part of the design process. Also this is a part of the process that I have a whole lot of fun doing. We all should be having fun in this stage because this is where we get to explore other professional designers' creativity while getting our own creative juices flowing. Now a very common place to find design inspirations would be something like Dribble, D-Hands, Awards.com, and Back in the Days, which is really just a few years ago, those were my go-to resources, but I've evolved the way I've found my design inspirations. One of the things that are very important to me when finding a design inspiration is I want to see a real-world use case. I'm building sites for clients. And so we want to find a design inspiration ideally if it's a live website or something that could be built into a live website. So what I want to do inside this video, I want to share you three other ways to find design inspirations and to help you on your creative journey. Design resource number one, that is building your own library of dope websites, websites that you love. Now I use a tool called RangeRof and I use a free version of it. I have the app on my phone, I have it on my iPad, it's on my Mac, it's with me everywhere I go. So anytime I see a dope website, a website, I really like, there's something done on it. I like, I save it and I categorize it and I start building up this library. And I've been doing this for about a year now and now my library of sites is huge. I got all kinds of categories going on and this is a great place to start because I have this library of live actual websites that there's styles that I like but I could see them live on the web so I could see how they could be applied to a real world case that I would use for a client project. Resource number two, this is going to be UI kits. I started utilizing these recently. Not only are they good for design inspirations but they're also good for when I want to use things like graphics and certain design elements inside of them. There are a lot of good platforms to find some really good quality UI kits. This is my go-to right here, it's UI8.net. It does cost, it's not that cheap, I'm going to be honest with you, but you're getting a lot of high quality designs and if you're doing a lot of design work, well you can get enough assets out of here that definitely makes the price worth it. Now there are other options as well like event elements where you could find some good stuff but you got to sift through a whole lot of rubbish to find the gems. Now how I would use this is I first would skip past all the mobile stuff. That is because well I'm building websites and that's what I'm looking for, I'm looking for UI kits that have desktop versions so I could use those. So we go through them and I can see okay we got something for really cool banners right over here, I can see an inspiration for a coffee shop and I will look for something based on the project that I'm on. Also I'm looking for the style that I am aiming for and then sometimes you could find some really good kits in here that have several different designs. Here is one that I have. Now this one came from UI8, I downloaded it, it had several different desktop layouts right here, it has 10 of them and this is a really good starting point. I could use this for my inspiration, I could see how the whole design will look, how it will flow, not only that I could use some assets right here like maybe I like this arrow, I could take this arrow, I could download the SVG and use it inside of a project. You know something like this, let's say we want to make an image with these graphics right over here, I could take these graphics, could change that image around and bam, now I got a really cool image graphic and then this gives me the inspiration and ideas to use for a project. Now everything that I'm doing here on Figma is a free version and if you don't use Figma and you're, this is just not your thing, you don't have to use Figma just to design, you could use it as a tool in many other areas as well. The thing though I do like a lot about using UI kits like this versus going to like say a place like Dribble is because I get to see the whole layout. I get to see the sizing, I get to see how the whole page will flow and look we're just using something like Dribble which is not bad by the way but I'm just getting screenshots of parts of a website so it's really helpful and then definitely this is a very, very great asset for pulling out graphics and using graphics for your websites. All right, resource number three and that is going to be Establish Designers Portfolios. This is something I've been using a lot lately and look, it takes more work but what you get out of it is so tremendously valuable. Let me show you what I mean. Let's take a look at Elementor Showcase that is showcasing the top websites. We could take a look and we could see which agencies and designers and freelancers are creating some really dope work. So I could go over here to Elementor websites for April 2022. And I could find some designs and styles that I like like right here I do dig this style and they do give credit to the design firm or the freelancer. Like for this one it's going to be solid digital. I could go over and check out their website and then from here what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to their portfolio. Now by doing this, I'm not just getting a bunch of mockups. I'm not just getting a bunch of spec pieces and fluff. I'm getting real live projects. I'm getting stuff that, look it, this is a designer that went back and forth with a client. This is a designer that learned the client's problems and applied solutions, things like that. And I get a chance to see what it looks like and what they did. Let's say right here I want to see their website. And look it, going based off of the screenshots and taking a look at the real website, it always looks a bit different. Cuz now we get to see how this is in real life use. And this is cool right here. Like this is a decent website right here. I see some inspirations like with color. I like this orange with this like teal green right here. These things get the creative juices flowing. But here is where more of the value kicks in by going and using this approach of finding design inspirations. Not only are we able to see the website but we get to go through it and see the process behind it. Like you can see here they establish the pain points and they talk about diagnosing the pain points, applying the solutions and just the whole process behind getting to the end result. And any professional designer, now if you do look at professional designers and their portfolios, all of them are gonna be doing something very similar where they're gonna be talking about the process. They're gonna be showing how they came to that end result. Now, Elementor Sites of the Month is a great place to go. I've taken a look at many just awesome, awesome design firms there. And then we get to also see websites built in Elementor, which is also a huge plus. So we know that hey, this design isn't impossible to build or it's gonna be like crazy, super custom, anything like that. And then we can take it to another level as well. Like right here I pulled up this top 10 New York graphic design firms. Now I'm gonna skip right down here to Pentagram because this is a firm that I know of, they're globally famous. Like this is one of the top design firms inside the world. From here, we know they're working with some of the best designers inside the world. They're working with some huge brands that have massive budgets and a lot of time is going into it. We could also do a deep dive and see what are they working on. What projects have they completed and learn more about that and find some projects that they've done using it as our design inspirations. Now, platforms like Dribble and Behance, they're still great to go to. And I love awards.com, I love it. I'm always on it checking out stuff, getting inspired and learning more stuff about design. Just cuz I love design, I love web design with a passion. But it does help to have some real world cases, seeing actual websites. That really does help out, especially when we are trying to get inspiration for projects for clients. We want to have something more realistic but still get inspired and have that as our guidance. Now, I do have a tip right here, a bonus tip when it comes to using design inspirations and this is really, really important. That is looking for inspirations and being way too focused in a specific industry. For example, let's say your client is a dentist, all right? They got a dental practice and they want to build a website. You don't have to limit yourself to just looking at other dental websites for your inspiration. The thing is, there are some industries where they just all have bad websites. We've had clients that their industry, all their competitors, everybody had a bad website. And in fact, what it really looked like was everybody was using their bad sites and their competitors' bad websites for their design direction and what they were doing. And what that did was it kept everything, it limited the creativity and put everything inside this box and didn't really allow for outside ideas to come in. So, if you do have an industry that you are working with for your client or for yourself, feel free to look outside of that industry for your design direction. It does not have to look like your competitors, especially if all your competitors have terrible websites. All right, I hope this helps out and if you have a passion for design like I do, then make sure to definitely subscribe, like and share. Do all that good YouTube stuff because that's what we're doing here. We're geeking out on design, elevating our design skills and I'm really, really grateful that you have watched. And I'll be back again soon. All right, thank you.