Being a web designer myself, I understand that sometimes we undergo a period of a form of "writers block." During this bland period, things are frustrating. You have no inspiration, no ideas, and no motive. All you need to get going is a spark of creativity. Once the flame is ignited in you, there's no stopping it. Here I've collected some of my personal favorite tools that I use almost every time I am working on a new project.

1. TypeChart.com

This is going to be great new resource for you typography lovers out there. TypeChart.com has pages among pages of nothing but samples of different font styles, colors, and sizes for you to get inspired by. Not only will it show you a load of great looking fonts, it will also tell you how web-safe each font style is by listing out compatible browsers and operating systems. To top it off, if you see something you like, the CSS to achieve that style is only a mouse-click away!

2. ColourLovers.com

If you've ever been stuck trying to get certain colors just right, you know how frustrating this process can be. Website designs are ruined if the color palette of the design doesn't work out. This is where ColourLovers.com comes in. Browse through thousands of inspirational color combinations and patterns while you flip through hundreds of their pages right from your browser. Also, if you're feeling generous, you can also create and submit your own color palette creations for others to use.

3. HTML-Ipsum.com

HTML-ipsum.com is a simple service delivered to you by Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks.com. He is known for being quite intuitive and creative, so we should expect nothing less from his little creation here. We're all familiar with the famous Lorem Ipsum dummy text I assume. How annoying is is to have to repeatedly go back and forth between your project and the Lorem Ipsum website generating paragraph after paragraph of dummy text and then having to apply all of the html tags to it yourself? It's quite a time-consuming process. The remedy to this problem? Why, HTML-ipsum.com of course. Just copy and paste the html-ready code snippets directly off the site and you'll have that much more free time on your hands.

4. ColorBlender.com

From the same guys who brought you Browsershots.org comes another ingenious website creation, ColorBlender.com. Similar to ColourLovers.com, ColorBlender.com actually helps you create a new color palette from scratch in real-time. Ajax-powered, ColorBlender.com is one of the most useful sites I've come across in quite a while. Sometimes the color palettes I accidentally create when playing around with the site actually get me inspired enough to want to start a new project right then and there.