Web design tips from everyday miscellaneous goods

Wallpaper design for my own site. I use commercially available material collections for parts like illustrations, but...

Coloring and overall atmosphere are things I think about myself based on a vague concept.

And what I use as a reference when thinking about design is the miscellaneous goods around me.

I have always liked looking at stationery, but...

Since I started creating websites, I have become more attuned to design when I look at things.

I collect ideas by paying attention not only to the design of the products themselves, such as letter sets, memo pads, and stickers, but also to their package design and collecting ideas.

When I find something with a design that makes me think, "This is it!", I sometimes buy it to collect.

When the concept for a website I want to create is already set, I sometimes even go out of my way to collect items with designs that fit that concept and gather them.

(For example, the design concept for "Magic Beast-Taming Maiden Eden" was "a design like the miscellaneous goods or stationery loved by junior high and high school girls," so I bought up a lot of fancy stationery at a 100-yen shop.)

What I use as a reference is not the design itself, but the "essence" of that design.

Specifically, things like "color combinations" or "shape combinations"...

For example, when I find good "combination patterns" like "I like this combination of shades of the same color" or "this combination of polka dots and lace patterns is girly," I store them one by one in my own drawer of ideas.

Then, I arrange those "combination patterns" in my own way and incorporate them into the site's design.

To give a concrete example, I previously discovered and bought some "stickers with a design that somehow attracted me" at a 100-yen shop, and...↓

Here is the wallpaper for a site I actually created, utilizing the "atmosphere" of those stickers↓.

I placed a clover pattern in white line art on top of a yellow-green background that I intentionally blurred to create uneven color.

This clover material is from a commercial collection and was originally drawn with black lines, but I changed the color to match the atmosphere of the stickers.

The website for "Magic Beast-Taming Maiden Eden," which I mentioned a little above, has its design slightly changed for each episode.

This reproduces the feeling often found in women's stationery "memo pads," where there are many different patterns and the design changes as you flip through the pages (or the way calendars and planners have designs that change slightly month by month).

The page design itself is also inspired by the atmosphere of "memo pads" and "letter sets" aimed at women.

("Magical Beast-Taming Maiden Eden" features a middle school girl as the protagonist, and the target audience is imagined to be those who might read magazines like 'Ribon,' 'Ciao,' or 'Nakayoshi', so the design is tailored accordingly.)

I keep the design collection I gather daily in a scrapbook so I can look at it whenever I want ↓.

(Things like memo pads for women sold at 100-yen shops, beautiful origami paper, etc...)

I've collected so much that the thickness of the scrapbook has become quite something... ↓.

Usually, I make scrapbooks using "ring notebooks" because they can handle the extra thickness, but...

I accidentally dropped a hardcover notebook I was looking at for design inspiration at a 100-yen shop, and since the edge got slightly torn, I quietly bought it without saying a word, and because it would be a waste not to, I'm using it as a scrapbook...