A designer’s creativity is often showcased in the little details and touches that he or she incorporates in a design. Using common, familiar objects as design elements to accent and ornament a web page is a wonderful way of showcasing one’s attention to detail. For inspiration, I explore the trend of utilizing paper clips by providing excellent examples to showcase how designers make use of them.
These People Comedy.com
Realistic paper clip used as a design ornament.
Blog.SpoonGraphics
A paper clip is used to hold up a piece of cardboard material, pinning up the RSS feed button.
Home Design Find
Here, multiple paperclips are used as ornaments to the design.
Viget Labs (teamviget.com)
A paper clip is used to hold up a strip of paper, with an important message that summarizes the purpose of the web page.
Point of Entry Consulting, Inc.
A paper clip is incorporated in the logo of the design.
Jeremy Thomas
Another use of a paper clip to hold up the name/logo of the website as well as the polaroid picture of the owner.
Robert Kwiatkowski
Robert Kwiatkowski holds up his logo with a paper clip.
Chemistry Recruitment
Paper clips are used to hold up a piece of paper with a testimonial of the service offered, and well as holding up a message that summarizes the intent of the web page.
Sabalan
A paper clip is used to hold together a stack of paper.
Leeds Web Design
Another example of a paper clip used as a design ornament. If you’ve gotten inspired to incorporate them into your design, you can simply take a picture of a paper clip lying around the house or office, and then importing the image into your favorite digital image editting application. You can also create it yourself using a vector creation tool such as Adobe Illustrator.
What are your thoughts on using common objects such as office supplies (paper clips, post-it notes, stacks of paper, tape, etc.) as design elements of a web design? What are some cool ways of using them in a web design? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section.
