Any designer, whether new or experienced, knows the weight of a blank slate. Starting a new project from scratch can be intimidating; you might not even know where to begin. That’s where inspiration comes in, but you need more than a Google image search can provide.
Thankfully, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best places to inspire incredible work. Let’s get started.
Behance
Adobe, whose suite of products you probably use to create and ideate much of your UX work, owns this site, so you know it’s going to be a good resource.
Behance has curated galleries of work in graphic design, photography, motion, and more—but, more importantly, UI/UX design for which it uses #interaction or the simple category UI/UX. There’s a search feature and plenty of ways to filter results to find the sort of work, style, or even designer for which you’re looking.
Dribbble
You almost can’t talk design without mentioning of Dribbble.
Here you’ll find portfolios of designer works, ideas you can buy, a community of like-minded people, jobs, and, of course, some eye candy that’s inspiration rocket fuel. It’s one of the best treasure troves of design work on the web.
Panda
Panda aggregates posts from many different sources to produce inspiration feeds for not only UX design inspiration, but illustration, branding, typography, and more.
You can filter feeds by sources such as Behance, Awwwards, or Reddit. It’s a one-stop-shop for design inspiration, and it will surely pump you up for your next project.
Niice
Niice has a dedicated space for inspiration for UX design. Like Panda, it pulls projects from all kinds of sources, such as Behance, Tumblr, or The Design Blog, and puts them on “boards” for your viewing. The service is free with limitations, but, should you find yourself in want of something more robust, Niice offers paid packages.
Awwwards
If your project is primarily for the web, Awwwards is probably the best place to find award-winning web designs that both maintain and defy trends.
You’ll find thumbnails of sites to vote on, the site of the day, and a handy feature that allows you to filter winners by category such as “Web & Interactive” (i.e. UX). You can even filter by the different kinds of technologies used (CSS3, Angular JS, Bootstrap, Drupal, etc.).
It’s hard not to catch UX inspiration from the sites listed here. Who knows, maybe some of the inspiration you get here will land you on the front page of Awwwards someday?
Conclusion
There’s no shortage of UX design inspiration on the web. Whether you fancy Behance, Dribbble, Niice, Panda, or Awwwards, there’s a lot to learn from these resources. They may help you start a project, or they might remind you why you’re pursuing UX design. But you should always be able to adopt the work of others to formulate your own, original ideas.
Whatever you do with your inspiration, we’re here to help you learn more so that you can execute all the great ideas you draw from these sites. If you’re more interested in finding work than inspiration, check out our compilation of 101 places to find design jobs.