Gaining Inspiration Online for Design Ideas

Gaining Inspiration Online for Design Ideas


When you're redesigning rooms or elements in your home, it's nice to be able to get some inspiration and see what ideas other homeowners have had. Sites such as Pinterest and Houzz enable you to quickly collate different images that you'd like to incorporate. This is far easier than having books and pieces of paper around your home, and it's a simple way of sharing your ideas with friends, builders and designers.

Interactive Inspiration

We've all put together mood boards before, whether for a design project or to do with work, and they can be a fantastic way of putting down all your thoughts and seeing what's actually achievable. Pinterest takes this to the next level and allows you to keep all your thoughts in one place online, like a virtual scrapbook. There's even the opportunity for others to see your ideas, so you've got the opportunity to inspire others as well as yourself.

If you're working on different projects, such as a kitchen redesign or renovating an iron spiral staircase, you can add different themed boards to help you keep your ideas separate. Often you'll find ideas in online stores, and you can link the images of these to one of your boards so you can see how they'll complement the other elements. When you want to buy items that are on your boards, the links to the original websites remain live, so you don't have to search through lots of stores to find what you need.

To get some more ideas from fellow pinners, you can search other pages and boards using specific keywords. When you find a pin that you want to keep, you can re-pin it to your board and even include a comment to act as a reminder for later.

Professional Designs

The Houzz website is a great way of seeing what the design professionals are doing, and there are thousands of them sharing their photos across the globe. This allows you to get inspiration and tips on everything from the design of an iron spiral staircase to landscape gardening from those who know what they're talking about.

As a homeowner, you can also bring together your favourite images and upload your own photos, as well as ask other members questions and exchange tips.

Both of these sites are free to use, and with the use of mobile apps you can gain inspiration even on the move.