From the list of the “27 best places you should visit to get incredible web design inspiration,” I visited the following:
The FWA: favorite web site awards. There were some A-mazing sites showcased here. Evidently you can submit your own site for consideration. There is a pblic shortlist available to view, which is comprised of sites any registered user can vote on. Then there is the site of the day, which is decided on by the FWA panel. The current site of the year, we choose the moon.com, is completely amazing. I love anything having to do with astronomy.
CSS Dance: much like the FWA, this site has a dark background and a double column of the current sites submitted for their impressive designs. Under each site are values for comments, delicious, tweets, and rating. There is very little information on this web site other than the submitted sites. There was a link for their blog. But, for example, I could not find any information about what goes into the rating value assigned ti each site.
CSS Design Yorkshire: Boy, oh boy do I love the Brits, and I also loved this site showcasing good web design, with it’s hip gray and orange layout. One thing I really liked about this site is that it had entries going back into 2006. It was pretty neat to go through the years and see which components of web design obviously have a more timeless appeal, as they keep showing up year after year.
Oriental Web Design Inspiration: Once again a gray background, which works really well for displaying shots of the showcased web sites. I actually chose this site because I am NOT a fan of this kind of design. I’ve never seen into the whole anime thing, which is what I think of when I think of “oriental” design. That being said, I liked the visual appeal of this site but could not get past the various spelling and grammatical errors I found. It detracts so much from what would have otherwise been a pretty cool site. I did like the articles that were available on web design.
Unique CSS: Very clean, modern looking site. Gray background again! It must be an accepted fact in the design world that it’s a good color to display screen shots on, because I’ve seen it used a LOT. On this site, designs are submitted every month, four are voted on to be displayed, then a winner each month is chosen from the four and awarded a cash prize. I particularly liked September’s winner, julie-hemery.com, and July’s winner, tossed.com.