My top 5 inspirational sites right now

Both as a web designer and as someone completely and utterly hooked on the beautiful things you can find on teh interwebz, I love finding websites, blogs and portfolios of work that inspire me again and again and again… The following is a list of the 5 websites which are making me dribble most at the moment:

GoMedia Portfolio and GoMediaZine
Now these guys Rock. With a capital R. The thing that strikes me about Go Media is that they design as if they weren’t even getting paid for it - as if the pure joy of creating these stunning images was all the fire they need to keep their pencils and tablets smoking. Their portfolio is inspirational on its own, but the really great thing is their blog, where you can find amazing tutorials, showcases and invaluable insight into the world of design.

Abduzeedo
Even though I loved this design blog before its recent redesign, I’ve warmed up to the new look, and the quality of entries remains right up there with GoMedia’s, but with even more frequent updates. A nice mix of inspiration, tutorials and interviews, this blog can keep you up all night if you happen to stumble upon it for the first time at 1am when you’re on your “just 5 more minutes” before bed.

PostSecret
A blog for people’s secrets, written, drawn and etched onto postcards and sent in anonymously - this may not be an obvious choice to look for inspiration, but I find it extremely inspiring for two very different reasons. Firstly, the secrets cover a whole spectrum of human emotion, from happy to sad, angry to apathetic, playful to vengeful… I can’t think of many things more inspiring than true, raw emotion conveyed on a little piece of board. Which brings me to the second reason; people who are not designers by trade, who may never have had creative inclinations at all, can produce these sometimes strikingly beautiful or thought-provoking cards with pictures, newspaper cuttings, pieces of string and other everyday items. Even the ones that you wouldn’t class as beautiful designs can convey the emotion of the message in a way that words alone couldn’t - isn’t that the goal of all design, ultimately?

ModBlog Warning: some graphic images
This is a blog for tattoos, piercings and other body modifications. I’ve always been fascinated with the various ways in which you can modify your body, and tattoos are now widely recognised as a form of art. Obviously the mods showcased in this blog vary from the brilliant to the shite, but as with PostSecret, the stories behind these tattoos (whether told or left to the imagination) are inspiring, as are many of the beautiful designs and some of their more unusual placement decisions.

Flickr HDR Photo Pool
HDR photos are all the craze. The Next Big Thing. So fashionable it hurts. But despite all that, they are extremely beautiful photos when done right. This photo pool has thousands of images to browse through, and you can always find a subject matter among them that interests you - or a new one you didn’t know you were interested in. Someone told me they felt HDR was cheating, like putting new paint on an old car. But I see nothing wrong with some visual embellishment. Finding beauty in all sorts of unlikely places, along with the painfully likely ones, is a good thing. I like beautiful things.

Between getting lost in the sites listed above and actually writing about them, I’ve just spent two hours on this post… I hope you find some inspiration in these, or that they inspire you to go forth and compile your own top 5!