Thursday, October 25, 2007

Retro Design Inspiration

One thing that I've enjoyed about starting a web design and development business is becoming more attuned to web design in general. I'm more cognizant of the design elements and overall layout of the sites I visit on a regular basis. I also make an effort to see who designed sites that I like, and check out more of their work for inspiration.

Sometimes, this takes me down long, strange paths through the Interweb. The other day, Amy at Having No Blog Is Your Blog posted a link to a zine / humor site. I noticed that, in the lower right-hand corner, they linked to Moxie Design Studios as their designer and PixelDecor as the supplier of some of the background patterns. So I cruised on over to these sites and saw that PixelDecor offers fantastic, retro desktop backgrounds at no cost. The image for this post is what's currently on my desktop.

Both of these sites are very different from what I've been designing so far. The color scheme, graphics, layout, and overall feel is way far out from my typical designs. But I think they're both great sites, and an inspiration to me to think out of the box more often. I'm meeting with a potential client tomorrow, whose site I think would definitely need to be more visually stimulating and theme-oriented than some of our previous sites. So I think this was a good time to get new inspiration.

5 comments:

Joelle said...

Thanks for the link... and the compliments! :) Best of luck in your business.

M. Lubbers said...

You're very welcome, Joelle! Thanks for the inspiration! You guys do great work.

Anonymous said...

Hay bud, cheers for the links!

I'm a code monkey from waaaaaay back and build the (often very) odd website. I've currently got a partnership with a designer who I build a lot of stuff for, but she's always waaaay too busy to design stuff for MY clients. Oh well... design is hardly my forte, so thanks for the inspirational links there *BOOKMARKED*

Jonathan Beckett said...

Thanks for the heads up on these! - excellent stuff. I shall be off making 1970s themes for my site immediately :)

M. Lubbers said...

Now that I have some fellow web designers reading my blog, I'll post more of these types of links as I find them.

Jonathan, were we reading each others' blogs at the same time? Internet sychronicity!