5 Great Sites Designers Can Point Their Clients To For Inspiration.

Working with clients isn’t always easy. Some know exactly what they want, others not so much. The key to creating designs that are satisfying to both you and your client sometimes involves opening a creative dialogue, which will allow you to understand what they are looking for visually, as well as explain what can and can’t be done, and explain which of their ideas will work well together and which ones won’t.

I prefer to let my clients get involved wih the design process by bringing me elements of things they like. I’ve never been much of a fan of specification, I’m a very visual person, so a client coming to me with lists and lists of “I want this and this and this” doesn’t work as well for me as them coming with a collage of images and various elements laid out on the table or on the screen saying “I like the position of he header on this site, but I really would like it in he type face from this advert I found.” and so on.

I’ve found letting clients get involved and ‘pick’n'mix’ the elements they like into a kind of visual brief tends to makes for happier clients, because some want to feel as though they were also involved in the actual outcome of their comissioned design, rather than just the specifiers of it.

Additionally, when a client comes with a more specific idea of what they want, it’s like them saying “I have a problem, can you solve it?” and as a designer you say “Yes I can!”, but when they bring you a list and you have no idea what they want, it becomes more a case of  them giving you that list and then you saying “Here’s some stuff I’ve done, I hope you like at least one of them.” Which situation would you rather be in?

Anyway, enough talk- on with the list!

Site Inspire

Showcasing the cream-of-the-crop websites in terms of design, Site Inspire is a fantastic starting place to show clients, especially if you have in mind to do something a bit more on the cutting-edge design side rather than a more typical site. Many clients become like a kid in a candy store over this one!

Colourlovers

Colourlovers is a cool site that allows designers to create and upload their favourite patterns, colours and swatches and then share, rate and categorize them. It’s a good site to point your client to, especially when they’re looking for a new logo or identity. They can search until they find a swatch they like, then they can send that to you, and you can grab the colours and implement them at lightning speed.

Kuler

Kuler works similarly to Colourlovers, except it’s created by Adobe and thus palettes can be downloaded directly into your creative suite applications! It also provides a number of semi-automated palette creation tools which help you create new colours schemes based on tried and tested colour wheel methods.

Myfonts.com

The new version of MyFonts.com is one of most user-friendly and fun font websites on the net. They have a feature entitled WhatTheFont, which can automatically find and tell you the name of a typeface just by uploading a picture of it from say an iPhone or by giving it a URL to an image containing the type face you want to know about. Clients love MyFonts because the great variety of fonts available offer clients the chance to imagine their brand name with different typefaces using their ‘text preview’ tool. Oh, and the MyFonts e-mail newsletter is quite simply the greatest e-mail newsletter of any company, anywhere. Ever.

Wolda.org

If you’re going to be designing logos, Wolda.org is a repository of the cleverest and most effective logos ever designed. It’s alot easier to talk with clients about a logo design when they can point me three or four of their favourite type of logos, and then I go to my sketchpad and create a kind of ‘aggregate’ design based on what I know of their company and any additional information.