16 Best Web Design Galleries for Inspiration

April 21st, 2009 by Jacob Gube | 61 Comments | Stumble It! Delicious

Web design galleries offer designers and developers creative inspiration on their own designs. By aggregating the top web designs on the web, a gallery serves as a prime spot for getting those creative juices flowing.

In this article you’ll find 16 of the best and most popular web design galleries ranked in order by the number of votes they garnered on a poll that was published earlier this month. On instances where there was a tie, the site with the higher Alexa rank received a higher ranking.

16. Web Creme

Nearing almost 4 years of operation, Web Creme is one of the more matured website showcases on the web. The websites are displayed with large thumbnails so you don’t have to be 2 inches away from the monitor to see them. The Web Creme archives can be filtered by using color themes of sites.

15. FAVEUP

FAVEUP is a design inspiration gallery that has a CSS Websites, Flash Websites, Business Cards, and Logo section. It’s an excellent one-stop shop for your design inspiration cravings.

14. CSSREMIX

Created and administered by New-media designer John Mills, CSSREMIX is a thumbnail-style web design gallery featuring some of the best designs on the web. Subscribe to the RSS feed so that you can get notification whenever a design is featured on CSSREMIX.

13. Design Shack

Design Shack currently features over 1,800 websites in their CSS Gallery. If you think that’s too much, don’t fret, you can filter the gallery by color, by the layout type, or by category (such as Corporate or Music).

12. CSSelite.com

CSSelite.com features high-quality web designs that users can vote and comment on. Check out the Best of the Best category to see the top picks on CSSelite.com. You may also want to subscribe to the CSSelite.com RSS feed to get notified of new designs.

11. The FWA

The FWA, which stands for Favourite Website Awards, is a Flash gallery that awards one site daily for the best Flash website. It’s a coveted award by many Flash designers – and the winners typically display the FWA badge on their winning site as a mark of prestige.

10. Pattern Tap

Pattern Tap is an excellent gallery for getting interface design pattern inspiration. At Pattern Tap, you’ll find collections of common site interface components like breadcrumbs and inspirational web forms.

9. Make Better Websites

Make Better Websites has an excellent philosophy: " We want to advocate a world without visual violation of shitty advertising.". You’ll see a clean gallery interface devoid of advertising.

8. Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine, the premier online publication for designers and artists, has an excellent Showcase section that presents high-quality and captivating design collections. At Smashing Magazine, you’ll find great collections of tabbed navigation showcase to more niche collections such as the sports website showcase.

7. cssheaven.com

cssheaven.com is a thumbnail-style gallery. They tag and categorize entries so that you can easily find designs based on keywords or categories.

6. CSSline

CSSline is a great site for those who just want to see the designs – the site’s own design is minimalist in fashion so that you’re focused solely on designs being featured. They tag entries by keywords and color.

5. CSS Mania

CSS Mania features hundreds of web designs a month organized into many categories for you to find exactly what you’re looking for. They also have an API for developers wanting to interface with CSS Mania content.

4. DesignBombs

The only description needed for DesignBombs is quoting the site’s tagline: Droppin Bombs All F**k’n day.

3. The Best Designs

The Best Designs features only top-quality designs which are categorized into many helpful keywords for easier navigation and searching of sites.

2. Best Web Gallery

Best Web Gallery focuses on quality rather than quantity: though you may not find hundreds of updates a month, whenever there are updates, they are of the highest quality designs.

1. siteInspire

At the number one spot for the best design gallery as voted by readers: siteInspire. siteInspire currently houses close to 500 high-quality designs which you can sort in a variety of ways. siteInspire also categorizes each entry meticulously so that it’s easier to find site designs on a particular topic.

A Poll

61 Comments

om ipit

April 21st, 2009

smashing magazine is the real web design gallery…
(just my opinion) :-)

Zach

April 21st, 2009

Thanks for this! nice list of useful websites I will visit from now on…

Bob

April 21st, 2009

#9 “Make Better Websites…You’ll see a clean gallery interface devoid of advertising.” — the screen shot clearly has ads on it. Just saying…

Danh ba web 2.0

April 21st, 2009

Awesome collection. I like Best Web Gallery and Web Creme
Keep up !

Matthew Smith

April 21st, 2009

Glad to see you think Pattern Tap ranks highly on the inspiration pool for web design :)

martino chiaviello

April 21st, 2009

Great collection. I have found these and more at http://designfeeder.com/. Loads a bit slow, but worth the wait.

misterfaster

April 21st, 2009

just too much! :D but nice, thx!

taylan

April 22nd, 2009

Great collection. CSS Remix absolutely my favorite.

Callum Chapman

April 22nd, 2009

never knew there were so many!

David

April 22nd, 2009

Thx 4 sharing. Nice overview!

kwer83

April 22nd, 2009

Nice collection, I missed my favourite though:
http://www.designmeltdown.com
Especially the option to load an entire set to a frameset is very handy ;)

Pradeep CD

April 22nd, 2009

cssmania, bwg, fwa are my favs…

Daniel H

April 22nd, 2009

Thank you to everyone who voted for siteInspire! Very happy with the result.

James

April 22nd, 2009

I personally think Designshack is one of the best out there but I do love Pattern Tap for finding specific designs for certain parts of sites rather than entire sites.

David Appleyard

April 22nd, 2009

Thanks for featuring Design Shack!

Creamy CSS

April 22nd, 2009

I think Creamy CSS is a good addition to your list ;)

swape

April 22nd, 2009

Web Creme is my first pick for inspiration . But Smashing Magazine is the best “list other sites” and cool stuff site.

Pat

April 22nd, 2009

Nice post. Smashing Magazine is my absolute fav.
I don’t like gallies where thumbnail show just a part of the screenshot. It’s not really handy, because you have to click on every link to get a full picture.

Marty Desilets

April 22nd, 2009

http://designsnack.com should be on this list! Their sort and ratings mechanisms are amazing

Mike

April 22nd, 2009

You completely left out one of the major ones, Design Snack (http://designsnack.com), my personal favorite. Add it to the list and the poll, let’s make it 17 :)

Aaron Irizarry

April 22nd, 2009

Nice list, I would also add http://www.onecss.com to that list, but I am a bit biased :)

Television Spy

April 22nd, 2009

Great list not so sure about smashing magazine, it’s not really web design gallery

Dan

April 22nd, 2009

i also like and can recommend http://cssbag.com

PelFusion

April 22nd, 2009

i really liked ‘The Best Designs’
and ‘Television Spy’ is right smashing magazine is not a web design gallery though its a nice blog

James Mann

April 23rd, 2009

Great examples of work. Really minimal and fresh. Seems to be the way these days that web sites are becoming more and more simplistic, which is great when i comes to building them, less things on the CSS to go wrong.
Think i still prefer building in Flash.

GFN

April 23rd, 2009

Excellent list, some I haven’t seen.

Pattern tap wins in my opinion:)

I’m not a fan of Smashing Magazine, I see they copy a lot of articles and post them as their own quite a lot

Jacob Gube

April 23rd, 2009

@Television Spy and @PelFusion: Yes, Smashing Magazine is not just a design gallery, though they do have a Showcase section which features round-ups of designs based on a specific theme. That section has been a great inspiration and I like it that way because I get to see a set of designs all in one page. I think that’s very handy. If I wanted to see a showcase of navigation bars for inspiration, or a showcase of sports websites – each in one page, Smashing Magazine’s Showcase section is the first place I go to.

And I think many people agree with me – SM got a decent amount of votes!

anistock

April 23rd, 2009

I always look to Design Shack and Smashing Mag for ideas/insights

Kate Mag

April 23rd, 2009

The CSS Gallery List is the complete directory for Web Design Inspiration. Check them out

Biz

April 23rd, 2009

Very good list of designs. Great!

Martin

April 23rd, 2009

You forgot http://acualicio.us/rainbowned/. I think, but great article guys.

Johnluffa

April 23rd, 2009

Great collection of sites – thanks for putting this together.

Brian Hoff

April 25th, 2009

Definitely some beauties here. Also check out http://www.cssglance.com – more great inspiration.

Sriteja

April 26th, 2009

Thank U.,
Your giving very lot of information and very very useful your site.

cheguevaramtebts

May 14th, 2009

i would like to mention this web site :http//www.cssillustrated.com
more great inspiration.

prasadsambari

June 9th, 2009

Its really cool,
Great collection,its very usefull for learners

Ravikumar V.

June 12th, 2009

I love these designs….. thank you. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WebDev

June 13th, 2009

I just “launched an new way of inspiration finding” :) It is a web gallery, but there are not only websites, but separate categories for headers, footers and navigations too, browsing by colors, random designs at the end of each post, etc.
It can be found at http://firsthandweb.com
If you have any opinion, what can I do for enhancing the gallery to serve better the creativity seeking community, just write a comment or contact me through the contact page.

gaus surahman

June 13th, 2009

Plus 1 for siteinspire and I love designshack too.

pre ypi

June 19th, 2009

This is really beautiful. Inspiration by the design literally!

Maharaji Quotes

June 19th, 2009

All of them bookmarked for good :)
have enough to keep me busy for the next couple of weeks.

andimazlan

June 27th, 2009

I’m a new newcomer in blogging world. Thanks, this post really give me an inspiration to tweak and re-design my free wordpress theme.

Adeel Raza

August 7th, 2009

My personal favourite: http://inspiremix.com

pennfolio

August 8th, 2009

Great collections, I’m a fan of Smashing Magazine, CSS Mania, Web Creme and The Best Designs. I also used to visit The FWA.

Thanks for the list!

Seth

August 18th, 2009

Usually I just go between http://www.cssmadness.com and http://www.cssmania.com

Both are very up-to-date CSS gallery.

Ashley Adams

August 28th, 2009

Hey!! These are some nice web design galleries…….but my vote goes out to Smashing Magazine. I’ve always found their articles very useful. I’ve also checked out “The Best Designs” and it’s interesting too.