Not only are the site designers dishonored by a complete rip-off, but the designer attempting to design by “inspiration” gets their name smeared. The design community can be brutal ;) Honestly, some of these inspired designers have the best intentions. They are starting out and mean the best. I earnestly never want to see a good designer get their name smeared in the name of inspiration.

I thought I’d share with you how I have been inspired by sites, movies and products for my last redesign of Komodo Media, version 4. I hope that through this designers can learn to be inspired by all great art forms around them, but maintain a style of their own.

Base inspiration

Click on a thumbnail for a larger version.

It’s very obvious what Komodo Media version 4 is on the whole. Thematically, its very jungle and islandish in nature. From wood to leaves to toucans to outriggers, it feels like you are lost in a jungle. Thats the intent. My inspiration came from a mixture of a love of Swiss Family Robinson and Pirate/Jungle movies as a child as well as a few visits to the Enchanted Tiki Room in Disneyland.

Once I knew the theme, I went around the internet gathering all imagery that I felt represented this theme well. I didn’t want to clone them. No, I just wanted to surround myself by the kind of things that spoke “jungle” so that I could design in that style. It has become a pretty regular process now for me to gather a ton of screenshots or images of inspiration and surround my design with them as I design.

Inspiration in the details

Infinise Design

In earlier mockups of Komodo Media v4, I used tabs that were inspired by Infinise Design’s tabs. I loved the smooth rounded edges that were slightly non-typical in websites I’d seen around the block. I ended up moving to the recessed wood pill-shaped navigation that you see now.

Bear Skin Rug

In earlier versions of the my mockups, I used an accordion style post browser in the right sidebar featuring popular, random and recent posts as well as categories. Something always felt wrong with it and it seemed a bit too narrow as well. My tabbed based solution was inspired by Bear Skin Rug’s beautiful sidebar tall tab implementation. I just loved it.

Command-Tab

As I was working on my mockups for Komodo Media v4, a good friend and fellow designer, Collin Allen was working on the new version of his site, Command-Tab. I was fortunate enough to see mockups of his navigation and fell in love with his hammer icon for his primary navigation. The other icons were nice, but the hammer icon…oooh, I loved it. That one icon inspired a total reworking of my main navigation and helped to inspire my icon, inset in the wood, pill styled primary navigation.

The Guinness Toucan

I like to make my designs mean something, especially my own site. I love Guinness. I was trying to think of a classy way to work Guinness into the site that didn’t scream beer drinker or drunkard. That’s not my bag and its not me. I remembered an old ad campaign that Guinness used to run using a toucan and that was it – I was sold. I quickly reworked my version of the toucan using Fireworks. You can see the Guinness toucan flying in the header, squawking next to my twitter stream, perched atop the outrigger in the footer, and adorned the mail stamp when you use the contact form.

Apple Mail

It’s been said a time or two before. Working in a creative and well-designed environment inspires design. For the longest time, I couldn’t put my finger on it. Finally, I realized why I loved working on my Mac. Every part of the interface feels aesthetically right and those aesthetics inspire me. In this case, I loved Apple’s mail.app icon so much, I designed my contact page stamp to match.

Super Mario Galaxy

At the time of my redesign, I was playing Super Mario Galaxy quite a lot. I love the Mario series and this game was no exception. Once again, I love tying elements of me into my design. I decided to keep this one subtle as well and designed the 5th star rating on my blog posts to be the luma from Super Mario Galaxy.

Veerle’s Blog

I guess one could say that a lot of things about Veerle’s blog inspired this fourth design of Komodo Media. I’m not going to say yes or no to that, but I do know that one element of Veerle’s design inspired me: the calendar icon. So I took her great design concept and made it my own…island style.

Apple iTunes

I guess I’m an Apple tool, but once again I got inspired by another OSX program, iTunes. You’ll find the result of my inspiration in two places. First, the pill shaped search box, albeit a grainy inset wood is inspired by the search field in iTunes. Second, my trademarked uber-awesome foliage-O-meter dons a knob that many have recognized to look very similar to the volume knob in iTunes, with a very different purpose. Apparently I feel that knobs to control the density of the jungle is on par with volume level. *snicker*

Hicksdesign

I’m sure a ton of things about Jon Hicks’ site inspired me during the redesign, however one very obvious inspiration is typography. Gill Sans for headers? Check. Lucida Grande for content? Check.

Inspiration comes from many places and over time. I encourage you to dig deep and look all around you for inspiration for your design. Don’t limit yourself by merely copying a site. Be inspired by others’ work and adapt and rework it to make it your own, bringing recognition to your own skills and honor to whom you are inspired by.