Collecting and Sharing Design Inspiration

Design inspiration is an important part of any project, especially when you’re hiring a designer to help you. It’s how you can communicate with your designer what you love and what you really don’t want on your website. Everyone has preferences and design elements they’re drawn to, so by sharing those, a designer can better create something that reflects YOU.

When I design a website for a client, I don’t copy other websites. We use inspiration to do just that – inspire us. The images and websites you share allow me to get a feeling for the overall type of website that fits your business and then use it to create something custom for you.

Obviously, wee don’t want to copy someone else’s website, even unintentionally, which is why the ideas you’re sharing are inspiration and not an outline of exactly how you want your website to work.

It’s great to love Jenna Kutcher’s Cosmo-style quiz or Ashlyn Carter’s business toolkit, but your goal in website design is to create something uniquely you and not copy pieces and parts from other websites.

Before you start

Before you start collecting and sharing design inspiration with your website design, make sure you know your brand inside and out - the colors, logo, and brand words.

These are the first place you want to draw inspiration from and will help you focus on what will reach your dream clients (and keep you from feeling like you need to look like someone else to be successful).

Creating a Pinterest board

When you’re collecting design inspiration for your website project, I recommend creating a secret Pinterest board that you can share with your designer. This way, you can put everything in one place without having to feel like it’s all perfect from the start.

You can either have one board with everything on it or create sections for fonts, website elements, colors, and patterns.

You should also add pins of your brand design - color palette, logo, patterns, and some on-brand images.

Collecting design inspiration

When sharing pins, make comments about what the individual pieces you’re drawn to, like the “about me” section or the use of color. If you can, just pin the section you’re inspired by instead of a whole website.

Gather inspiration by taking screenshots of websites (in every industry) that you love and add them to your Pinterest board. That way, you won’t be limited to the popular pins that come up in your search - instead, you’ll have the entire internet to pull from.

If there are pieces of your current website that you love, pin those as well. We don’t have to throw everything out when designing something new.

Look outside of your industry for design ideas. Magazines are great for this because they’ve been designing layouts for decades and know what people are drawn to. Sure, you might not be able to translate that directly onto a screen, but you can pull the elements you love and incorporate them.

Finally, don’t feel like you’re limited to only pinning Squarespace designs. We’re working together because we want to think outside of the Squarespace box!

Editing your inspiration

Once you’ve pinned design elements from different places and made notes of what you love, it’s time to edit!

You want to take a look at your entire Pinterest board together and remove anything that no longer feels like it fits your brand or that if out of place. You also don’t need to repeat the same elements over and over - I can see from just a few pins what you’re inspired by.

The next steps

If we’re working together on your site design, we’ll take some time in our kick-off call to review your Pinterest board and make sure that we understand what you love (and don’t want) before we start mocking up the design.

It’s important to have this conversation early in the design process so that the first version of the mockup is moving in the right direction from the start.

If you want to learn more about the process of working with us to design your site, check out our example timeline.