“Research: First Steps for Designers” Elliot Jay Stocks

In his new book, Sexy Web Design, Elliot Jay Stocks shares the methods he uses to create stunning web interfaces—and one of the most important steps is to do some research. In this sample from the book, Elliot explores different ways to gather inspiration and cool ideas for your next project.

Look Outside the Web

I’m a keen believer in the idea that if you only use web sites for inspiration, you’ll only ever build a web site that looks like other web sites. Of course there’s nothing wrong with that—it’s essential that a web site looks and behaves like one—but you risk your design growing stale if you search for stimuli in only one place.

There’s a whole world out there full of outstanding design—architecture, fashion, product, packaging … why confine yourself to one medium and limit your creative potential? Take your trusty camera and go for a walk—collect photos of signs, textures, anything that grabs your fancy. Doodle in a notebook whenever you have an interesting idea. Before you know it, you’ll have a huge collection of inspiring material from the real world.

If you look at the world of print design in particular, you’ll see most of the same principles of web design at work. After all, the new discipline of web design is derived from years of print design tradition, but with a few of the limitations and freedoms reversed. So there’s still plenty of inspiration we can take from the print design world to better inform what we can achieve on the Web.

Collection Tools

I’ve been saving interesting and inspiring snippets in my Flickr profile, but it’s not the only way.

RealMac Software—the team behind web development application RapidWeaver—have recently released LittleSnapper, a Mac application that allows you to collect sources of inspiration from the Web and share them with your peers. It’s a nifty new tool for Mac-based designers, and one I’d heartily recommend.

For Windows users, TechSmith’s Snagit application captures screenshots and screen images, with a library you can use to organize your screenshots by tags, URLs, and date.

Then there’s Evernote, suitable for both Mac and Windows, an all-encompassing note-keeping application that you can access from just about everywhere, thanks to versions for your desktop, phone, and web browser. You can create, upload, and save images, text and audio, and if there’s text contained within the image, Evernote’s optical character recognition (OCR) engine will identify it and make it searchable. That’s very handy for when your notes archive becomes rather large!