List of Really Useful Website Design Showcases

May 13th, 2009 by W3Avenue Team in Design, Lists
Tags: Design, Inspiration, Showcase

Whether you are a legendary designer or someone less awesome, you need to get your design inspiration from somewhere. These days a large number of web blogs regularly showcase inspirational websites; but once these posts get archived it is pretty difficult to find something specific & fresh. This is where dedicated design showcases come to the rescue.

These showcase sites will not only provide you with your prescribed doze of design inspiration, but will also save you a lot of time by helping you locate what you need quickly and easily. Unfortunately like everything else, not all design showcases are created equal; even if they showcase same websites. This difference comes from their ability to assist you in finding what you are looking for.

Frankly a good number of the dedicated showcases simply index sites into various categories and leave you to browse forever in hope of finding the killer design. Therefore we have compiled this list of only those showcases which provide useful search/filter tools and/or have focus on some specific segment/concept.

Comprehensive Search / Filter Options

Following showcases provide you with comprehensive tools to search/filter their database (i.e., by layout, color, content type, rating, comments, etc).

Find Inspiration By Color

Following showcases provide excellent search/filter options based on colors.

Find Inspiration For Specific Page Elements

These showcases provide design inspiration for specific page elements like Buttons, Comments, Footers, Headers, Signup Forms, Tables, etc.

Find Inspiration For Popular CMS / Publishing Platforms

Following showcases are dedicated towards providing design inspiration for popular CMS / Publishing platforms like Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, etc.

Find Inspiration By Design Concept

Following showcases are dedicated towards providing inspiration for specific design concept.

Other Verticals

Following showcases are dedicated towards providing design inspiration for specific concept, industry, sector, etc.

Strictly CSS Based Websites

If for some reason you are only interested in finding inspiration from sites that are strictly CSS based and are not using TABLEs in their layout then following showcases will help. If you own or like a showcase that fall under this category, please feel free to mention that in comments. We want to keep this list short and may only add your site in this list if it is also providing some special/unique features to help users find what they need.

Follow The Designer

There are many awesome & really creative designers out there; here are few sites that will help you find their portfolios.

Follow The Crowd

Following sites will help you find showcase sites based on their traffic or popularity. These are specially useful when you want to showcase your own work.