Transform your personal style or stay on top of new architectural and design trends with these 10 Style sites! These top 10 sites can offer you new perspectives on fashion, style and design as you progress through the new year.
Get Back In Style
There is never a bad time to change your style. Why not use 2015 as an excuse to be more style-conscious? When it comes to fashion and home decor, it’s easy to become accustomed to your typical habits. It’s also tough to stay on top of the latest trends. These ten sites have been chosen as the best opportunities to improve your personal style while staying on top of trends and connecting with others that are trying to do the same thing.
Stay On Top Of Design Trends
Some of these sites offer gadgets, products, or clothing that can lead you to a new style, and some are magazines or advice sites that can point you in the right direction. The rest of the sites have a focus on architecture and design, from a professional social network to a blog that showcases the best up-and-coming visual designers. Above all else, this collection of sites is intended to get you thinking differently about style as you continue through 2015.
TouchOfModern
TouchOfModern offers daily sales on modern designs. Accessing these deals requires becoming a TouchOfModern member, but joining is as simple as signing up with your email address or Facebook account. Once you’re in, you’ll be able to find highly discounted gadgets, furniture, and home decorations. New items are added on a daily basis at 2 a.m. PST, and the products offered are wide-ranging. All of them, however, have some element of modern design. The products are curated by the site’s product buyers, and the company connects customers directly with the designers. It’s the best place to look for deals on home and lifestyle items to fill your 2015 with a new sense of modern style.
High Snobiety is a daily online street lifestyle magazine and news site. As its name suggests, the site caters to a higher-end audience, featuring profiles of luxury cars like the Mercedes-Benz C111. Although many of the features tend towards the snobbier side, the site is also rooted in street culture and features hip-hop and music coverage as well as sneaker collection and other fashion profiles. It’s editorial scope is similar to that of Complex, as its at the intersection of art, fashion, music and lifestyle culture. In addition to its regularly updated articles, High Snobbery also has its own store (which, as of now, offers just hats and a print magazine). There’s also a Store Guide feature that directs visitors to High Snobiety-supported brick-and-mortar stores in locations around the world.
If you want to improve your style in 2015 while also having a positive impact on society, Milkster offers a unique opportunity to do exactly that. Milkster is an e-commerce site that offers the world’s finest interior design, home and lifestyle products. It also operates on moral grounds, choosing to feature “products with a purpose” that do not negatively affect the environment. Milkster also provides customers with direct access to the creators of products, cutting out the middlemen and creating for a more supportive community of designers and buyers. Many of the designers even have their own profiles with background information about their personal history as well as a list of their available items. In terms of the actual products offered on Milkster, there’s a wide variety (from lamps to stools to saucepans). The items can get relatively pricey, but all of them are high-quality and well-designed.
Motilo is an interactive solution to your styling needs. The site offers a platform for users to ask questions about their fashion concerns and receive a quick, honest response from the Motile staff. The company employs a team of fashion advisers that can answer style questions of all types — nothing is off-limits. This makes for a convenient online shopping companion, as you can ask questions like “what to wear to Superbowl weekend” or “How to wear silver & not look like a spacewoman” and receive specific responses and recommendations for things to purchase. Especially for those who want to change their style in 2015 but don’t know exactly what direction to go, Motilo is a great place to start with any and all fashion concerns.
If you’re an architect or designer that’s looking to improve your knowledge or skill set or collaborate on new projects in 2015, you should consider signing up for Archilovers. The site is a social network for architects and designers, allowing professionals to connect with each other, collaborate and share projects. It’s like a career-specific LinkedIn, with companies, teams and offices all hosting profiles in addition to individual architects and designers. It also offers a platform for designers to host their projects, and there’s a huge list of designs that’s available for browsing via the site. It’s an active, supportive community, and communicating/collaborating with other designers is one of the easiest ways to expand upon your own abilities and further your professional goals.
One of the best ways to improve your own style is by taking inspiration from others. When it comes to the workplace, there are infinite options for arrangement and design. For some companies, an open-office plan is ideal. For others, cubicles make for the best way to get work done. OfficeLovin contains a collection of office layouts of all types, providing a sneak peek into the best tech and startup offices/co-working spaces from around the globe. Each featured company offers a virtual tour of their office space, complete with photos and background information about the office/company size and layout. Even if you’re not interested in the design of your own company’s office, browsing OfficeLovin is entertaining just to see how the spaces out of which your favorite companies operate.
Most of the sites we’ve featured on this list place an emphasis on modern design, but Collector’s Weekly is a destination for those that love vintage and antique items. The site offers comprehensive information about a wide selection of rare items, delivered in the form of full-length articles and interviews. It’s an editorial magazine for collectors, with a focus on antiques and memorabilia. The articles truly explore items in-depth, offering context and history that’s not typically present on other collector’s sites. The site also has its own “Show & Tell” section, in which users can showcase their best vintage finds. Most antique items might not be considered stylish by modern standards, but that doesn’t matter. Collector’s Weekly is a place for celebrating the old and unique.
We Are Visual Animals is a digital design blog that showcases emerging visual creatives. The site, which was built and is written/curated by developer Charlie Clark, contains in-depth profiles of many different types of visual designers. There’s typically an accompanying interview with the artist, but the focus is on the work — which usually consists of some sort of photography or digital imagery. The site offers the opportunity to explore an artist’s background and intentions, and it’s a celebration of the unique forms of visual art that are being created on a regular basis. Browsing We Are Visual Animals might not improve your personal style, but it’ll certainly open your eyes to the great design pieces that are available online as well as the talented, up-and-coming digital artists that are behind them.
The Sketchbook Project is one of the coolest digital art projects taking place online, and it encourages everyone to be an active participant. The project is a traveling library of artists’ sketchbooks, featuring a crowd-sourced collection of thousands of sketchbooks that have been submitted by artists of all skill levels from around the world. The site sends blank sketchbooks out, asking artists to fill them with anything that they desire. After the book has been filled, artists mail the book back to the company, which features it in their digital library. This offers an exciting opportunity to participate in a cool project. The way that the sketch books are preserved online is great, and it’s easy to explore the thousands of creations that have already been submitted.
Paperhouses was created so that users around the world could access architecture on their own terms. It’s an open-source platform that gives anyone access to downloadable blueprints of architectural design. There are several prominent architects and architectural companies with materials available for download on the site, and the projects range in size, scope and location. The site is also free to join and blueprints are free to download, so it truly accomplishes its goal of democratizing what’s long been a closed-off profession of architecture and design. For any designers interested in finding inspiration for their own projects, or simply browsing the designs of others, Paperhouses is the perfect place to explore.
