As designers, we all love to design – it’s only natural. That’s when we’re at our best, pushing pixels round and all that (joke). I know personally from my own experiences that I honestly spend a little too much time designing. You see, the trouble is that I like to make everything from scratch. Icons, menus, footers the lot. That’s not always a bad thing, especially if your commanding a HUGE fee. But, sometimes a project just doesn’t need it. So, why not think about using stock in your work? Shock! horror!

I’m not on about any old stock – because often some stuff just looks stock, it has that “overly professional” feel, like the presenter with the whitest teeth ever! I’ve started using a series of site’s under the Envato Marketplaces, as a source for quickly building designs up and I must say, it’s saved me hours of hard work and thus made me more profit. In particular, the GraphicRiver marketplace keeps working it’s way into my work-flow.

Benefits of using quality stock

• Save time not needing to re-invent the wheel
• Make more money, by having time to work on other projects (it all adds-up)
• Help beat creative block, by giving you a solid start to a design

Example

Let’s look at an example of one of my latest sites, built using stock. I’m not ashamed to say it – using pre-made elements in this design saved me hours of pretty pointless work and gave the design a very clear, defined theme.

MacMount

MacMount is a little project of mine, that I’ve been working on for months. The site design was going nowhere, because as always I’ve hit the problem of the whole “designing for yourself”. The problem usually stems from you feeling the pressure of trying to make the design the absolute best piece of work you’ve ever done. Sometimes creativity doesn’t work quite like that. The harder you try, the more strained it feels. You tend to really, really over think things – this probably comes from the having 100% creative freedom. You have no idea where to start, question every concept you make, create several alternate designs and just end-up moving in circles in general. We’ve all experienced it, I’m quite sure of that.

So, before starting this project, I knew something needed to be different from the start. Firstly, I treat it as though it was a client project. I drew up a proper brief, designed several logo concepts, garnered feedback on those and took it from there. Once the branding was in place, it was time to design the site. The logo used is pretty generic, so the look and feel of the site could literally have taken any route.

I based the site design on two files really, I liked the very clean, Apple like style. This made sense knowing the intended user base for the site. The two files were:

3D Download Buttons

http://graphicriver.net/item/3d-download-buttons/114920

This file was a steal at only $3 for several concepts. I ended up using the top download buttons, as these looked unique and very cool. Creating something like this may have taken only 10 minutes in Photoshop, but to get it absolutely pixel perfect and to create the concept in the first place could have taken hours. Just for a button. We designers are pedantic about these things – so to simply buy and download a psd file that is ready to drop in is genius! This formed part of the styling influences for the site – most particularly the colors and theme.

Slightly modified to suit the big typography, with price added and the text was amended on the red cross over banner.

Re-sized for add to cart and various smaller buttons. A real bargain as it forms the basis for the most of the Mac Mount styling. It doesn’t in anyway look stock either, so you’d have never known if I hadn’t told you

Blendy Navigation Menu Bar

http://graphicriver.net/item/blendy-navigation-menu-bar/114924

A little bit of tweaking and this menu suits our needs perfectly.

Adding our own twist to the menu, with some drastically altered typography to give the menu a cleaner look and adding 3 icons we needed.

As you can see, we probably saved ourselves 2 or 3 hours overall design time (if you account for sketching, iterations e.t.c). For that privilege we paid just $6. That makes a lot of sense to us, because that was 2 or 3 hours we freed up for marketing, promotion, development e.t.c. You should seriously consider using stock in your non-critical or internal projects.