One of the toughest step of web designing has always been the part where you have to crack your head, thinking of the best concept and presentation for the topic you're doing. If you are a perfectionist by nature, double up that level of difficulty. If situation allows, I wouldn't be surprised if the difficulty level might increase even further, taking into consideration other factors such as client's complex requirements, insufficient supporting materials, lack of time, etc.
Designers are designers for a reason. They're borned both creative and innovative. They can see and picture things even before they're physically constructed. Essentially, they simply own the ability to make normal things look uniquely beautiful. Nevertheless, they still do have limitations to the creative ideas they can generate. They need some point of reference to fuel up their creative banks, as well as to speed up the overall designing process. As how everybody likes to put it, more heads are better than one.
Having said that, let us help ourselves by making use of these designers's piece of work. One of such areas where you can harvest such ideas is web templates. The main reason why you can generate such unlimited great designing ideas from analyzing web templates is simply because they probably fulfill every single requirements of a typical information database. Web templates don't only come in abundance, but they come beautifully in abundance. If you ask me, web templates provide both quality and quantity for you to squeeze out your creative juices till the final drop, in the most efficient manner. Theoritically, you're getting these other web designers to help you your work out without even knowing it.
Let's assume that you yourself or one of your clients wants you to get a "restaurant" site done. Through normal instant reflexes, probably you'll get a piece of paper and write down every single idea you can think of. Best colour scheme, layout, where should the menu and navigation will be, images, buttons, icons, content placement, usage of flash, logo, how complex it should be, etc. For me, what I'll simply do is to get myself to any one of your favourite web template website and start searching for web templates that run under the keyword restaurants or probably food. One of the website that you can get your research done is http://www.dead0eye.com/.
I'll type in restaurant in the search box on the top of the page and wait for the results. I'll save the preview image (right click the web template image of preference and save it) of each of the web template that catches my attention into a new folder in my hard drive. I usually save around 10 to 15 web template preview images before I stop completely. Too much ideas aren't really a good thing for your design work. Keep it strictly to a specific number and stay with it. You can search through the web templates using different keywords to get a more wide diversity of results.
As obvious as it seems, the choice of saving the preview images is simply based on the "you know when you see one" concept. Even if you like how the curves look like at a particular area, save it so that you can harvest its concept later on. If you like the combination of colours, save it. The arrangement of certain icons with the content attracts your attention? Save it. It is simple as that.
Now comes the interesting part. Take this next step like a jigsaw puzzle, rearranging the puzzle to create a whole brand new design. Try to be as innovative as possible over here. Take certain parts from various templates, combine them together and don't hesitate to throw in your own ideas to make the final piece a much better one. You've just combined few great ideas in an even bigger final idea. Who told you that you need to think of brand new ideas from scratch?
If you're into keeping a "design idea database", you can always cut or crop the unique parts of the web templates you saved and save all of them into a single file. Everytime you're planning to design a new site, just load up this file into your favourite graphics software to get your creative juices flowing again. Add more ideas into that file as you find more along your designing adventures. You'll find that getting ideas isn't that really a difficult brain squeezing activity anymore.
With this technique, not only you can save huge amount of time planning your work, but at the same time, you'll be indirectly cutting down the workload of your future designing works without even realizing it. You can work and get the job done faster, think less, improve your work quality and ultimately have more time on other important areas of implementing and maintaining your websites. Try this technique, you'll be surprised how fast you'll get your websites up.
About the Author:
John Teh is a Malaysian Web Designer, currently active in providing web services and solutions to anybody who needs them.Web Design Malaysia - http://www.motionedgedesign.com
