I’m a web designer/developer by education and by trade. Moreso a developer than designer, but occassional I manage to create something pretty.

However like many designers I often need inspiration to get the juices flowing. I make my weekly visits to the ever-popular CSS Zen Garden, a site used early-on in the web standards game to showcase what can be accomplished with CSS. The Zen Garden used to be my first stop, and I’d spend several moments after each visit crying about what an ameteur I am compared to some of the designers featured there. These days I find myself perusing CSS Beauty instead.

CSS Zen Garden was a great showcase for “what you can do” with CSS, but CSS Beauty shows what is actually done in practice. Real sites. Real content. Real fucking pretty, too.

But if you really want to see a beautiful design, peruse the front page of Suicide Girls, a site featuring “Post-modern pinup girls for the Alternative Nation.” Sure, its basically a porn site. But artistically you can’t help but appreciate the design: the meticulous care the designers put into the most subtle details; the perfect layout masquerading as a chaotic mishmash of text and kinky ameteur polaroids; the contrast of perky breasts against your grandmother’s bathroom wallpaper. I don’t even care if the code validates. It’s too beautiful to care.

Sorry to those of you who don’t give a rats ass about web design. I’ll write something fun for you later. : )