One of the best ways to gain inspiration for your own iOS projects is to take a look at the styles and design trends practiced by other mobile designers. This article is a roundup of five of the best sites to checkout while brainstorming your next mobile masterpiece!

Creattica

Creattica's gallery provides many high quality examples of mobile design. Like most of the other sites listed here, the mobile section is heavily focused on iPhone design.

Dribbble

The Dribbble community tends to post many works related to mobile design, with a strong sampling of iOS designs in particular. An important benefit gained from viewing content from design community sites is that they often offer a glimpse of upcoming trends while those trends are still being created. Make sure you browse other Dribbble sections as well, such as Dribbble - UI Designs and Dribbble - General App Designs.

TapFancy

TapFancy is a gallery based site. Although it has not been updated recently, the applications posted provide an ample amount of inspiration from currently published applications. Each application posted contains multiple screenshots of the application's various states.

iOSpirations

iOSpirations is another gallery based site. iOSpirations does not have as much depth as some of the other sites listed here, but it does contain distinct iPad and iPhone sections of published applications with subsections for games and general applications.

iOS App Roundups

App roundupps are an excellent resource for finding design concepts that have been proven to work. By simply searching "Amazing iPhone App Designs" or "Top iPhone App Deisgns" in a Google search, a large number of these lists will be displayed. The example provided is from the Appstorm iPhone blog. Two more roundup lists can be found at AppStorm and YouTheDesigner.

BONUS - iTunes App Store

This one is obvious, but many people forget that such an extensive resource exists for browsing applications already published in the App Store. This listing has every available application on the Apple App Store. The only reason for not listing this resource first is that unless one has a defined list of applications they would like to preview, it is very hard to sort through the thousands of applications to find a design you would like.

One Final Thought

If you are not already, now is the time to become aquatinted with Apple's iPhone Human Interface Guidelines before browsing other designs. It is important to always keep these guidelines in mind during the brainstorming process!