Finding the right place to get inspiration is always problematic even for the most experienced designers. The vastness of the topics we deal with and the great knowledge of the sector that each project brings with it, always creates some doubts on how to find the right information. This article was created to bring my experience to all users who read and to give ideas that can be useful even to the most experienced users of the network. Before starting, a phrase that I have often heard from my professors during the university period: "Google is your friend, learn to use it". This short but wise mantra reminds us all that before letting ourselves be inspired, it is good to be clear about what we want to look for and be masters of the means that the network makes available to us today. But not only that, sometimes disconnecting and doing other things helps to set our cognitive and creative processes in motion, having a good library related to our design sector is often a gold mine for ideas and reflections. Now let's move on to the list of the most useful platforms to find inspiration.
The first and most famous is Behance. This portal contains portfolios of Designers and Creatives from all over the world, not only that, it also allows users to use it to create personal galleries where to save projects, in order to have playlists divided by topics managed by the user. Small but big news implemented a short time ago, the possibility of creating moodboards by directly saving individual photos of a project, so as to be able to enclose in a single sheet the various inspirations that will lead you to understand which design path to take. Second, both in importance and longevity, we find Dribble. This platform, unlike the previous one, does not host detailed explanations in the projects and very rarely shows the background or the creative path to get to the final. This is because Dribble was born as an aggregator of shoots, images or carousels from a few photos (a function introduced in recent years), which give the possibility to Designers and Creatives from all over the world (only at the invitation of others already present on the social network) to publish the final result of their creative and aesthetically performing projects or experiments, but sometimes inaplicable. The third platform, the last of the generic ones, is Pinterest. This ancient social network, two years older than the first version of Instagram, is excellent as an aggregator of ideas, here too we have the possibility to create saved collections and to publish projects, the audience is smaller than the previous ones and sometimes the quality it suffers, but it remains an essential tool for researching and observing the progress of design trends. Let's now move on to two more "sectorial" platforms, mainly dealing with Branding and UxUi, I recommend for the first Designspiration, while for the Ux and the Ui, especially the second, Collect UI. Designspiration as well as being useful to understand if our ideas have already been used, it is highly recommended to create stylistic moodboards to make the customer understand the style or styles of Design that you want to propose. Instead, Collect Ui, similar to Dribble offers shoots but all based on the design of the User Interface, very useful for finding new solutions to solve problems of spaces or creative crises in the web and app. Image credits: Pexels - Andre Moura
