

Web Designs from DeviantArt - jonphillips
http://spyrestudios.com/25-fun-creative-web-designs-from-deviantart/
How many web designers can say that there are too many places to draw inspiration from? Exactly. None. Inspiration is welcomed from high and low, far and wide. Sure, there are css galleries you can check out, or even other designers portfolios you may be friends with on twitter or other social media websites, but what about Deviant Art?
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seldo
These designs all have one thing in common: they look amazingly beautiful at
first glance, and if you had to use them every day, they would drive you
absolutely crazy.

The difference is between something designed to impress (like, say, a
ceremonial sword) and something that actually does its job efficiently, every
day (like a kitchen knife). The biggest, most popular, most _used_ sites in
the world all have really simple, get-out-of-the-way designs: Google's UI is
almost not there, Facebook's gets simpler with every redesign, Flickr's tries
hard to disappear completely.

Now, there are some objects, very rare, that are both beautiful and used every
day -- the kitchen knife that's also pretty. I'd put Flickr's UI in this
category. But the majority of heavy-traffic designs are ugly but functional:
think Craigslist, Amazon, and our own Hacker News.

So no disrespect to these designs: they're amazing. But sheer visual impact is
not the only metric for judging web design.

~~~
jamesbritt
"These designs all have one thing in common: "

They look like print magazine spreads.

Which goes hand-in-hand with your observations on their bright-but-short
impact.

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mahmud
Startup idea: Get those DeviantArt hippies under one freelancing roof so
people can hire them.

On more than one occasion, I found something I liked there and I had a paying
client who wanted "something like it"; either the artists weren't answering
emails, or they were busy doing term papers, or they just sent me nice step by
step instructions on how to do the same in photoshop along with the plugins
they used, yet some "added" me as a friend and forgot to reply.

~~~
spencerfry
DeviantArt is meant to be a social network for artists. The people there
aren't posting work looking to be hired. There are other more appropriate
websites for that.

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geuis
I absolutely love those designs! But let me ask an honest question. Look at
the top sites on the internet, per traffic and revenue. Most(but not all) have
nice designs but are visually simpler. Most of the time, if I see a super
awesome design its immediately:

A) An edge site(being personal, small community, niche audience)

B) A commercial site trying to get the "hip young crowd".

One of my top concerns when developing sites is the size of graphics. The
bigger concern is the size and complication of javascript. Implementing sites
like these would be fun, but what kind of overall download are we looking at
for our users? How much does this affect our sales or ad click-thrus for our
audience?

