Creative web design on the mobile phone is here, thanks to the iPhone innovating the market. It can be very tough searching the web for inspiration when you need some when designing for the iPhone. It's a new market, you're not sure what users are expecting when it comes to standards (Example: where should the nav go?).

If you have tried Googling for iPhone inspiration, you know you won't get far. I tried it. The best site I found was a blog post listing 20 of the best optimized sites — it was pretty old. If you're like me, you end up browsing the web where you find yourself never knowing if a site has a mobile alternative or not. If the site has one, you either have to use your phone to find it, or take a stab at what the sub-domain is: m, iphone, i, mobile, ect..

It's very rare when I can sit down and knock out a design in one sitting. The entire world thinks that we can sit down and pump out a design in a few hours...start to finish. That means IA, wireframing, planning, style discovery, and everything else. I don't think I've been able to accomplish this since before I really understood what designing for the web was about...which is a lot more than just making things...pretty.

Quality design doesn't happen overnight; it takes time....it takes patience. It takes getting away from your computer for awhile so that you can have a fresh set of eyes when you come back.

Sure, there are some people out there that can create beautiful sites in a couple of hours and still have time to kill, but what is the UX like? How balanced is the users eye when they view it? Can you pick any element on the design at random and give a logical expression to why it's where it is, and why it's even on the page in the first place

I browse css galleries before I start any design, even if I have a clear vision of the direction I want to go with. My favorite gallery to browse for inspiration is CSSMania because it showcases a ton of sites everyday, some good and bad, but it gives you a fairly good thumbnail so you can weed out the bad sites.

When I am browsing galleries I'l go through and click on the thumbnails that have potential. The first problem is almost every design looks good in a small thumbnail so when the site loads it either gets a quick close, or i stay and examine it.

Too often when I am looking through designs I see so many sites that have some great potential...but that's all. I get to looking at it closely and spot minor details that don't seem finished. It's like the designer gave up half way.

Houdini sucked at magic, every modern magician will agree on that; it’s amazing how the entire world remembers him as one though. Why was this? Why didn’t the better magicians at the time be remembered like Houdini?

I was watching a History Channel special on Houdini, and ever since he has been great inspiration to me.

Starting out, he was an unsuccessful magician in a circus where he was only doing card tricks with only one act where he escaped from handcuffs. He realized that people only cared for his escape trick; he retired the cards, and opened a show with full emphasis on escape tricks.

He knew magic was not his trade, he knew that his knack was performance.

Designing for the iPhone was a refreshing experience.

If you don’t follow my twitter than you don’t know that I released an iPhone version of my site. I rolled it out in only 2 days worth of development time. When you don’t have to worry about cross browser compatibility, and you don’t have to spend most of your time living within the constraints of CSS2, development becomes extremely refreshing. Half of what we do on the web is problem solving anyway; no matter what medium we are on. On the desktop we think past CSS2 constraints; on the iPhone we solve real estate constraints.

With the success of the iPhone, competitors are bound to catch up sooner or later – everyone will have a full fledge web browser in their pocket. So, with my experience designing for the iPhone, here are some things I have picked up along the way.