Web Design

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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Horizontal navigation bar is one of the basic elements of web design. It occupy less space and grouping the menus horizontally can make page navigation easier too. Plus, it can be customize to be fitted to any kind of designs, from clean and sleek to retro wooden style. Here, I presented you 60 good looking horizontal navigation bar designs that I collected through out my web design research.

I found out that games related sites especially online games utilized horizontal navigation bar, because it can display the menus without using a large space. Navigation bars that build using flash can have cool rollover animation, however horizontal bar also achievable by using CSS list style and rollover effects if you know the ever popular sliding door effect. But in here, I won’t talk about the technique but pure beauty of navigation bar design for your design inspiration and reference. I separated into 3 categories: games related, non games related and good design examples from DeviantArt.

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