Top 20 Inspirational Websites for Designing Your Work & Life
“Mostly I make lists for projects. This can be daunting. Breaking something big into its constituent parts will help you organize your thoughts, but it can also force you to confront the depth of your ignorance and the hugeness of the task. That’s OK. The project may be the lion, but the list is your whip.” – Adam Savage
It is no secret that lists help us organize our priorities. We enjoy reading them, and we enjoy writing them, and they make life easier by giving us a direction and objectives. But, as Adam Savage states in the quote above, making lists can be daunting.
What seemed at first to be a fairly straight forward project or plan suddenly transforms into a behemoth of a task, spanning several steps. This should not bring you down, though. Now that you know all the things you need to do, you can prepare accordingly, and it is all a matter of checking all the steps off the list.
In these fancy, hi-tech modern days, you no longer have to pick up a pen and paper to write your list. Furthermore, you can use other people’s lists to make your own. That’s the beauty of the sites we are about to show to you on our list.
Social bookmarking sites help you get inspired, and also plan your projects and life, bringing a drop of order in your otherwise chaotic creative existence.
You are probably familiar with at least one of the entries you are about to see, but we are confident that there are more than a few entries you don’t know, and that will soon find their way in your bookmarks.
1. Pinterest
Let’s just get this one out of the way. Pinterest is a massive social bookmarking website, currently ranked the 29th most popular website in the world. If you are a designer, you’ve no doubt spent at least a few hours here pinning designs, or looking at other people’s pins, so this wouldn’t be a proper list if Pinterest wasn’t on it.
2. Bucketlist
Bucketlist is an excellent tool to use when making a life’s ambitions list. If you are a serial list-maker, than you are definitely going to love this website. You can track your list from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection, as well as get inspired for you list by following other Bucketlist users, and seeing what goals they have, and how they achieve them.
3. Gentlemint
Like many entries you are about to see on this list, Gentlmint works like a niche Pinterest, specifically for people with real manly interests. It covers topics that range from cars to vices to fitness, and much more. It really is up to you to decide what a “manly” interest is. The American Mustache society even praised it as being one of “the manliest sites on the Internet”.
4. Trippy
Trippy is a website for travelers, and it aims to simplify travel planning through what they call “friend-sourcing”. It allows you to read and write reviews and lists of destinations, to get inspired or to help inspire other people in choosing their next trip. It’s a great community of people who like to broaden their horizons, and see as much as they can of this cool world we call home.
5. Discover
Pinterest is very universal in terms of topics, and that’s why, as a designer, you might find it hard to find the things that interest you for work. You don’t have to worry about that with discover. You can follow great designers to get your daily dose of design inspiration, as well as post you own galleries to get some recognition and give some other people a few ideas for their own designs.
6. Hometalk
Passionate about homes and gardening? Then Hometalk is the place for you. It is the largest social network of it’s kind, with hundreds of real-time projects and questions posted daily, and a community that is more than willing to share advice, tips and photos of their projects, so you can get some inspiration for your own.
7. Springpad
Springpad is something of a life-hack. It is a website and affiliated app that you can use to organize anything from tasks, work projects and movie watchlists, all the way to recipes and grocery lists. It allows you to keep all these things private, or share them so you can show off you excellent culinary skills, or work on a project with you team. An excellent tool for dynamic modern man or woman.
8. Kulisha
Still in it’s Beta stage, Kulisha is a “social network aggregator” that allows you centralize you various social network feeds all in one place. You can pin posts to watch later, so you don’t have to scroll around from them, and it homogenizes your Facebook and Twitter feeds, making it a fantastic helping hand if you’re a social media addict.
9. fyndesters
“If LinkedIn is about your achievements and Pinterest is about your aspirations, than fyndesters is about your personality”. That’s the way this website describes itself. It’s a way to look back at the things you acquired throughout your life, and it aims to connect like-minded individuals so they can share stories and images that have had an impact on them.
10. FoodGawker
Kind of like Pinterest, only specialized in all things food related, FoodGawker is a fantastic place to lurk and find great recipes to make fantastic looking dishes. Posts are submitted by food bloggers from around the world, and are reviewed by the websites editors, making sure that only the best submissions end up on the site.
11. Dribbble
Dribbble is a bookmarking website for designers, based in Salem, Massachusetts. It boasts having 193,426,667,580 pixels “dribbbled” so far, so it’s an excellent place to showcase your design projects, and get a bit of feedback on them. Also, it’s a great place to go when you need to get a few ideas for your project.
12. Pingram
If you’d put Pinterest and Instragram in the Large Hadron Collider, and took out the result of the two impacting at colossal speeds, you’d get Pingram. It started as Gennaro Variale’s website, which was suppose to share his photos on a Pinterest-like website. Of course, the project snowballed and became this lovely site we’re showing you.
13. LittleMonsters
Say what you will about Lady Gaga’s hardcore fans, but they definitely are a creative bunch. This community is all about Lady Gaga inspired art, and it is a great place to see some really cool works, whether you are a Little Monster yourself, or not.
14. CraftGawker
If you have a more hands-on approach to your art, than CraftGawker is a site you should definitely check out. Like FoodGawker, CraftGawker takes submissions from craft bloggers that are then reviewed by their editors, and published on the website. It’s a great place to see some terrific craft projects.
15. AllMyFaves
This is a very meta entry on our list, and we are rather proud of it. It’s bookmarking website for websites, and it is a fantastic way to discover cool sites to help your organize your life and work.
16. Sworly
Everybody likes music, and most of us make playlists so we can have our favorite tracks ready at the push of a button. Youtube is great for this, but it is a bit unreliable at times, seeing as copyright infringements keep popping up and deleting your track. Sworly’s like Pinterest for music, giving you a great way to discover new tracks, and share your favorite ones, without having to worry that they’ll eventually vanish.
17. Lover.ly
Wedding planners rejoice! This is a terrific website to share and find great ideas for wedding planning, and make the whole process of planning a wedding just that little bit easier and, perhaps, just that little bit more fun.
18. TheFancy
Stuff, things, possessions, all at the push of a button. TheFancy is a crowd-curated catalog of deals, whose purpose is bringing to you all the things you might want to buy, at the best prices they can be found at.
19. 500px
You probably already know 500px. It’s a great resource for either stock or art photography, and there’s not much else that needs to be said about it. We really couldn’t have ignored this site, and still call it a good list.
20. PinCat
In the words of the great Sergeant Terry Jeffords from Brooklyn Nine-Nine: “Cat. Kitten. Cute. False sense of security. Gun. Dead”… well, maybe not the last part. Cats are adorable, and sometimes you just want to spend some time looking and the fuzzy little creatures, so have at it.
That wraps up our list of 20 websites for designing your life and work. We hope you enjoyed it, and that you’ll find these websites useful. Don’t forget to tell what you think of the websites we’ve chosen, in the comment section below.
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