Inspiration

Certainly water plays a vital role in our normal daily life, we simply can’t live without it. Water keeps us fresh and healthy. Plus, water also giving a sense of serenity and symbols of live. Recently, I saw some site designs also incorporating the water elements into the design, which I think is really unique and refreshing.

This marks the fourth edition of the Inspired By Nature series in this blog. Well, I found this water series is very interesting and it’s quite hard to find too. Many sites using water element as background, sidebar elements or simply the whole site was full with water. As you might had guess, the websites with water are majority based on blue color scheme, maybe because of the sea. End of talking, so please have a look the 10 beautiful sites with plenty of water!

Design Disease

The latest site refresh by the pro design team Design Disease. All I can say is the design is just WOW. Daring color scheme and the wavy shapes are really breaking the boxy feels of web design. Brilliant design!

Stylized Web

From the previous black and white, Stylized Web now also featuring water inspired design like Design Disease but softer color scheme. Notice that the layers of colors of the sky, sea, and ground to separate out the contents. Brilliant idea!

Luke Larsen

This is an online portfolio of Luke Larsen, and it looks like a huge aquarium tank! This fishes are really making this site to live. Clean and nice, I like it. Notice the page navigation too.

Iceberg

Ice is also consider as water too. So this site is utilizing the sea surface and the natural iceberg which giving a sense of chilling cold!

Icebrrg

Certainly don’t mix up this one with the one above. Unlike Iceberg, Icebrrg’s design was beneath the sea with the sun lights shines through the water.

Adit Shukla

This is a really unique website design. The designer using the river to depict the sidebar.

Kulturbanause

Probably the most extraordinary blog design I ever seen. Kulturbanause also featuring water element like the waterfall, which falls from the top of the page to the bottom. Really awesome!

SPA Vilnius

I am very fascinating about this site intro flash movie. The dancing color in the water is very special and worth a look!

Honda – Edit Screen

It’s summer time! What a cheerful site design. In this site you can make your own screensaver with a self customized bubble character (cute!) and download for own use. It’s a full flash site and the color is really bright and cheerful!

Anessa

Finally Anessa! Well when think of summer, I will think of sea… and Ebi-chan :P. Recently Oricon conducted a survey also shows that when Japanese people think of summer beauty, they will think of Yuri Ebihara.

When I’m out of design ideas or have free time, I love to visit surf web showcase galleries to see some fresh web designs and get inspiration. But there are so many web galleries out there available and it is impossible to remember them all. Fortunately this website just solved the problem. Introducing Gallery Gallery, a summary list of popular web galleries gathered in one place. Currently listing 179 galleries, well I think that’s a lot!

Alternatively, there are some similar lists like Dia Chronie Web Design Gallery Links or The Great Web Design Gallery Round Up, but both of them are not as complete as Gallery Gallery. I think it is a very useful sites and should bookmark it for future reference.

Frequent visit web galleries

Among all those galleries, there are some web galleries that I often visiting:

• Straightline Bookmark
• CSS Clip
• DesignShack Gallery
• Web Design File

Actually there are some more others too but above are the most frequently visit one. And what’s your favorite web gallery?

This is the 3rd version of “Inspired by nature” series. After the wood and the grass, this time we look high to see websites that inspired by blue sky and clouds. Websites that uses blue sky as part of designs normally gives us a very refreshing, cheerful and delighting feeling, as well as a sense of huge space, life and hope. So, these websites are like telling the sedentary office worker like me that, please get off the chair and go out and take a deep breath and get refreshed by the clear blue sky! 😀

Some sites used real blue sky and cloud and other sites was using illustration to depict the scene instead. After a trip to some sites, I found 17 websites that utilizes the cheerful, bright blue sky and clouds. One little note is that the BottleBuster site shown below was done by Web Team in the company I worked. I’m in that team too 😉

BELLECOUR ECOLES D’ART ET D’INFOGRAPHIE 3D LYON

Welcome to BIG W

BottleBuster

Carbon Neutral Newcastle

Dibusoft mmdv

Folietto

Fresh AIR Apps

IMAGE DIVE

Joomza

Julia Kröner

Krew Media Group

mydezzign studio

Peak Plants

Pixel House

Qwert City

Welcome to Signal7

Sumisho Urban Kaihatsu

Above are the 17 sites that has blue sky and clouds as part of the web design. Hope you get inspired from the websites shown above. From all the sites, my most favorite is Folietto and Qwert City. What about you?

Picture header credit: Watching The Heavens Fall by -kol

This is the second episode of Inspired by Nature web design series. The first series talks about websites with wood, and now we move on and take a look on other nature elements which integrated into website design: GRASS. From some grass inspired research, I found 12 websites use grass as part of web designs.

The natural green colors of grass is a instant attraction because it feels fresh, the richness in texture, and giving a sense of depth. Many uses grass as background and use it in website header. Company that provide grass related services also implement grass in their home page too. Besides that different execution of grass also can be seen. Continue reading to find out the 12 grassy websites! Continue reading

Nature elements especially wood can be seen in many website design nowadays. The natural textures and shading of the wood surface and color can make a website looks rich in texture and green in feel. Even well known web designers like Alex Buga and Shane Seminole Mielke also used wood as part of their portfolio site design.

Wood mainly being used as a website’s background image, but there’s some other websites use wood for other purposes as well. It’s fascinating to see how different wood color and texture can give different feelings to enhance the design. However, this does not mean that simply using wood texture can make the design nice. Many other design elements like font, color schemes etc has to take into consideration as well, in order to be harmonic with the wood. Well, you can learn from the 27 good website designs that with wood.

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