I’m going to guess right now that if your a designer like me, then you face many of the same hurdles in design that I do (cough IE6).  But one of the main things I get tied up with is becoming stagnant. Everyone has their tricks, tools and trades they use when approaching a new design, it’s part of our “style” which can be a great thing.  

But sometimes, we as designers, find ourselves getting tired of our polished routines and want to break the mold a little, or even worse, someone else (art director, fellow designer or even a client) suggests you do.

This is where things such as gallery websites,resource link lists, and more come in handy to have as a backup plan for finding inspiration.  

Over the past month or so I’ve mocked up a handful of sites.  Some called for the typical minimalist things that you can’t stray away from too much but some have been much more wide open.  This is where a good embellishing is needed to bring life back into designing for the web.

Some things to help you avoid becoming stagnant:

When you’re done designing your website, and you think it could use some more, well uh, “wow factor”, try digging through some gallery websites for what I call “Detail Inspiration”.  Don’t just go there and copy their layout, image widths and dimensions, check out some minor details that you know the designer put much thought into.  Even if its a 1px border of 10% opacity running horizontally under the header to emphasize the break, minor as it may seem, the designer spent time in the decision to use that.

The Footer

I’m sure if you surf the designershpere as much as me, you’ve seen some pretty awesome looking footers.  Well take note and apply some of these concepts to your footer. It may bring a new look and feel to your design you didn’t have before.  Here are some great examples:

Web Designer Wall

TNT PIxel

Icons

Icons.  Utilize some icons in your design.  They don’t have to be huge glaring icons but subtle icons for bullets for example.  These are some great examples:

W3 Markup

N-Design Studio

Callouts

Go nuts on your “callouts”!  Instead of just drawing a shape, dropping a headline on top and maybe an image or two, do something like this:

Training by Collective Idea

Alex Cohaniuc

These are just a few things that I think of when I’m looking at a mockup I just “finished” and for some reason it just doesn’t seem finished, polished etc.  I tend to go back and try and find where I can drop in my little details to give it that extra little something.