Helix House Creative Strategist Shares How to Create Inspired Designs

The time has come for you to sit down and to think about creating a website for your business. It’s a big job — where do you even start? To help you along with the process, Helix House Creative Strategist Indre Puodziukynaite shared her strategy to create solid and inspired designs for online content.

Step One: List Who You Are

It’s likely you’ve already browsed a bunch of websites and saw things you liked and didn’t like. This is great, but it can also impact your creativity and your ability to stand out from the crowd. After all, you don’t want to be doing something that everyone else is already doing. To create an inspired design, Indre recommends starting with a fresh slate. “I always brainstorm first and then research later. It helps keep it unique and your own, without any outside influence,” Indre said. To begin, think about your company, your culture, your product/service, what feeling you want to convey through your website. Do you want it to be fun, bright, and animated, or dark, sleek and high-end? Whatever you decide, make sure that it matches your company! For example, you probably don’t want a website about Scottsdale architects to look like it’s selling island properties by the Arctic Ocean. You want to match your colors and overall feel of the website to who you are and what you do. To start that, begin by simply brainstorming just that and jotting down a list of every word that resonates with you and your business. It could be something dramatic and design-oriented like:

• Clean
• Modern
• Bold colors
• Large font
• Professional

Or, it could be more emotional, such as:

• Softer colors
• Nurturing
• We help you
• Family feel
• Welcoming

Once you have your list, you can begin to think of ways to execute those ideas.

Step Two: Brainstorm Creative Implementation Ideas

Before you go online and see how others executed your “who you are” list, sit down and think of how you want it to look online. Do you want animation? Or do you want the page to remain stagnant as you scroll? What about a large header photo or video? Think of ideas that match up to your list. It can be as small as “I want the color blue” or as big as “we should have the homepage be one 3D figure that rotates around to show off our different capabilities.” Whatever it is, you should write it down and have a few brainstorming meetings with your team before you start to go online and do research. Always have your own inspired design in mind before you start looking at what other people have done.

Step Three: Find Other Inspired Designs

Researching other websites lets you see what the current trend in web design is. “It’s important to see trends and what’s popular right now,” Indre explained. “You want to be creative, but you don’t want to do anything that’s completely different. If people see something that’s too weird or too creative, they probably won’t like it even if it's pretty.”You can adapt your inspired designs to fit into the trends, but also stand out from the rest. You can also modify it based on any inspiration you get from other websites. But how do you find other inspired designs? “If I’m building a website, I try to go look for website inspirations that are built around the same idea,” Indre said. “If I can’t find something specific, I look at styles.”Her four favorite websites to use for research and design inspiration are:

Dribbble

• Her top choice for inspired designs
• Full of professional and current work from working designers
• Newest and most current trends
• Follow the biggest studios and designers in the world.
• Need to be invited by other designers to participate so not everyone can post work there
• Only high-quality, talented designers shown

Behance

• Professional designer and studio portfolio site
• High-end work, great for inspiration
• All types of inspiration
• Save favorite artists and studios and follow their careers/work
• Feedback from people on pieces
• Anyone can upload
• More experimental, but professional
• Hyper-creative

Awwwards

• Best for web design inspiration that’s super creative and out of the box
• Tons of creative work submitted by the best designers across the world
• Actual feedback and rating on design
• Tons of categories for web design
• More hyper-creative, showcase pieces
• Potentially not the best functioning websites

Pinterest

• Huge variety of inspiration for all kinds of design
• I make folders for different design styles
• Tons of design to look through
• Some are ads - little less professional  
• Quick ideas
• Gives a lot of images quickly, but can be random

Step Four: Start Making it Your Own

Take notes of what you like, what you don’t like, and meet with your team to talk about how to implement everything. Remember — website design takes time! You shouldn’t have everything done in a week! Brainstorming should take as long as you need it too, and solid development should take awhile too, depending on the scope of your project. At Helix House, our website design process started in January 2020. We’re still deep in development — it took us about three months for everyone on the team to hammer out our new inspired design! And that’s okay. Your website should reflect who you are. It should be a point of pride for many years. And, perhaps most importantly, it should stand out to leads and convince them to make the leap from potential client to satisfied customer.Making the best website for your business is not easy. We haven’t even talked about how to make it SEO-friendly either. If you’re unsure where to start and want a little help with creating your own inspired design, Helix House is happy to help. Give us a call to start working directly with Indre to make your website one that stands the test of time.