I found out I'm not the most creative person... unless I've had a few beers and have that happy accident. Emulating other people's work that you admire can help you at least develop a standard set of styles to work with. I'm more of a technical designer so I try to stay out of the graphics and design end and focus on function and clean code that works.

I found this article to be very inspiring for ripping ideas. This really helped me on the design level... white space is the stuff!
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007...clean-designs/