Get inspired for web, photography, anything – SmashingMagazine.com

If you’re like me then you probably are more geekier than you are artistic.  I don’t think of myself AT ALL as a designer, but rather one who appreciates both good design and good user centric design.  You may look at this site here and say it doesn’t, and that is okay…I’m trying my best :-).

But often I find that I need some tweaks, icons, templates, application design inspiration for a Silverlight application, whatever and just want to do it myself.  I’ve found the one place now where I start to look and be inspired: SmashingMagazine.com.  If you’ve never been there, go and subscribe now if you are interested in design.  Over the past year I’ve found it to be one of the most amazing sites for inspiration and design resources that I’ve added to my toolbox.  Of all the feeds I subscribe to, I can count on the syndicated content coming from them to be 99.999% inspiring and helpful.  I find myself adding almost everything they send to my delicious bookmark list!

Here are some of my favorites and examples (most recent):

• 9 Common Usability Mistakes in Web Design
• 50 Must-have Photoshop Brushes
• The Ultimate Collection of Useful Photoshop Actions
• 50 Excellent Digital Photography Photoshop Tutorials (great HDR and tilt-shift examples here)
• 15 Beautiful High-quality Free Fonts
• 50 Free High-quality Icon Sets
• 100 High-quality WordPress Themes
• 404 Error Pages (with style)

And there is so much more.  I look at their Inspiration and Freebies links a lot for aggregation of some of the best stuff.  The great thing is also to pay attention to the end of each article.  The writers are doing an excellent job appending highly relevant information to the topic.  They don’t just show you their top 50 favorite photo blogs, but the related information shows you links on how they were created and where to get more information.

Smashing Magazine has been a daily resource for me for useful tools, resources and inspiration…I highly suggest you add it to your feed list or bookmarks…I am sure it will be a great resource for you as well!