Any type of designer or artist needs inspiration from time to time to get any work done. And there's a lot of places online to get some of that. There are obviously various social networks that can provide you with that if you're following the right people or looking at the right pages. Wouldn't be a lot easier to just have purpose built social networks for designers where you wouldn't necessarily have to do all that? That's where these two sites come in.

Dribbble

Dribbble is a great little basketball-themed resource for designers. It's an invite only site where people post snippets of the things they're working on. Much like Twitter's 140 characters, Dribbble has a 400x300 pixel limit, allowing you to only give people a snapshot of your designs.


The site also allows you to follow various designers so that your feed shows you the kind of work you specialize in. For example, I focus on branding and even while I enjoy looking at the occasional user interface design, it doesn't do much in way of inspiration for me. The ability to follow other branding specialists is a great way for me to keep on top of trends and spark any ideas in my own head.

Finally, Dribbble is also great for freelance designers. The Pro package allows you to have a 'Hire Me' button on your profile. Every member has access to the job board where employers might be looking for a wide range of designers. And the site also features 'Teams', companies who may need design services as well.

Follow me on Dribbble

Behance

Behance is a little more content heavy than Dribbble is. It allows designers to post their entire projects and you're not likely to see any posts featuring only a single image, which does even more in terms of inspiration as you can see the amount of work that a person has put in. The great thing about Behance being more content heavy means that it also allows people to also post resources such as fonts and tutorials which has come in handy quite often for me.

The thing that I love about Behance the most is that when the people you follow 'Appreciate' projects, those projects show up in your feed. It's a great way to stumble across new designers as you come across work you might never have found otherwise.

The site also has a job board but can be limited.

Being owned by Adobe, you can sync up your Behance page with your Photoshop or Illustrator Creative Cloud programs and post work directly on there.

Follow me on Behance