Being a designer, I am always having a look about the web for inspiration and interesting resources. There are so many web galleries out there showcasing web design talent from all over the world and for me it is important to keep myself in loop with what’s going on and the latest design trends.

Before I start any new project I tend to have a good browse around sites like Best Web Gallery, FWA and CSS Mania as well as mind mapping all my initial ideas down on paper. I think this part is so important as it allows me to get all my ideas down in black in white in front of me and explore all the different options.

I have made a list below of the top 10 sites I visit everyday which are all part of this process.

1. Best Web Gallery
This site is a hugely popular web design gallery. It showcases everything beautiful about CSS and keeps me up to date with the latest design trends. As a gallery, this site displays sites in a simple yet highly functional way which makes me want to browse it everyday. It is built using Wordpress and uses a really nice jQuery rollover image preview for each site thumbnail which makes it even more user friendly.

2. Design Float
Design Float is like Digg for designers and it is really popular for list posts, tutorial blogs and is great for resources like fonts. It's a handy way to read lots of great design posts from blogs all over the world that I otherwise would have missed. Also if you manage to get one of your own posts featured on Design Float you can expect to see your site traffic rise to anything up to 3000 hits and more in one day.

3. Smashing Magazine
Again this is a really famous design blog which is updated on a regular basis. The style of posts here are mostly quick reference lists of design inspiration and links which are always well illustrated and interesting to read. It also features a lot of guest posts from some of the most influential web designers out there.

4. Just Creative Design
Just Creative Design is a blog site from Australian designer, Jacob Cass. He is a great blogger who writes about his great design processes among many other things. His posts are always informative and inspiring and I find his site particulary useful for everything about logo design.

5. QBN
QBN is a community site for designers, which features quirky and original design from all over the world. The thing I particulary love about this site is the live Public Vote message board on the homepage. I have yet to come across another site which uses a feature like this just as well and it always generates some interesting debates and is also great when you have a quick query about something as someone will always help out. Check it out!

6. Da Font
Da Font is where I mainly get my free fonts on the web and just because they are free doesn't mean they aren't great. There are so many great fonts available and I always seem to see them being used on many web projects as well as lots of different ads in the media. 

7. ffffound
This blog site showcases a huge, weird and wonderful collection of graphic design from artists all over the world and is always, constantly adding more. I can always be sure to be inspired by something here.

8. Flickr
Flickr is a huge online community for photo sharing as you know. For me personally I love the variety of photos I come across and having recently looked through pictures of Belfast I found a photo a neighbour from across my street had taken of the view over Belfast which I thought proved how widely used the site is. I use Flickr for inspiration in many things and have also used it recently for getting inspiration for my wedding invitations.

9. SXC
SXC is a source for royalty-free images which always proves very useful if I quickly need an image.

10. iGoogle
Lastly, I always subscribe to my favourite blogs with RSS through Google which collates all my chosen RSS feeds together and displays them concisely for me. I don’t even have to visit the site to read the post, it can all be seen within the iGoogle environment. If you don’t use or are new to RSS readers, I would definitely recommend iGoogle.