Becoming a Great Web Designer
I've been a web designer for 12 years and this is a topic I'm extremely passionate about. Becoming a great web designer is all about knowing how inspiration works, and understanding that there are no limitations and no boundaries.

There is a very small sub-set of web designers who are naturally gifted. They are the same types of people who without training could draw or paint you a masterpiece on canvas. I've met only a couple of these types of designers in over a decade. For the other 99.9% of us, becoming a web designer means hard work, attention to detail, mastery of our tools and finally artistic inspiration.

For the first few years of my career I was a mediocre designer at best, a very good web developer though. I struggled on the design side. I had a good eye for design, I knew Photoshop, and Illustrator inside and out. However, I didn't have the right mental mindset for a designer. I'm not what you would call a natural artist so I didn't naturally know how to go about getting inspiration, being creative and being unique.

Not So Good
See the photo below for one of my mediocre designs from years ago.

Before Aha!
While still in my mediocre phase, I would approach a web design as a blank slate. I knew great web designers created unique designs, designs that are one of a kind and push the boundaries of what's possible. I thought, just like so many other designers I meet now, that when creating a design I had to do it all from my head. I would sit in front of the screen and try to think about what the design should be and what I could do. I didn't look for any outside inspiration. I was under the false illusion that great designs came without any outside inspiration. I was so wrong. What's sad is the number of young designers (and some not so young) that still think the way I did.

Inspiration Aha! Moment
I was watching a video on 3D animation a number of years. I think we can all agree 3D animators are amazing but what I learned was that they weren't all master artists. Some of them, a lot of them, came from development and coding backgrounds. The particular video I was watching was about the animators designing 3D animated animals. To my surprise these animators had no idea how to make the animals look real. They had no idea how to make them walk, or move them or to color them. The start of the process for these animators was to go out and shoot hours of video of the animals, take photos, etc,. They would then take all this work back to their office and use it as reference and inspiration for creating their animations. In hindsight this shouldn't have been a surprise but again you would be surprised by the number of designers to this day that this would be a surprise to.

Application to Web Design
This insight into these real-world animators and artists started me on my path to the designer I am today. I learned to start using my environment around me, videos online, pictures online, and any reference materials I could to help me get inspiration. This now includes other site designs by my favorite web designers. My bookmark list has several hundred sites in it and I would estimate that half of those sites are other designer portfolios.

Creating something unique starts with inspiration and yes inspiration can come from other people's work. I'm not saying that any web designer should copy a design. What I'm saying is that you should spend time getting inspiration from other great designers. You should find components of sites you like and then modify them, stretch them, spin them, scale them, warp them, re-design them until you build a better footer, header, navigation or whatever. Take your inspiration and improve upon it until it's your own creation.

Inspiration can't be limited, you have to use every asset available to you for your inspiration. It might be tv commercials, magazine ads, product packaging, a movie intro, or another website. A great designer understands that inspiration comes from anywhere and everywhere. Find your inspiration and then make that idea your own, make it better than the original. Feel free to use any of my work for your inspiration, just bookmark and get started on your way to being a great web designer.