My biggest inspiration is definitely Owl City, his clean 'cute' sounding synths have played an important role in me developing my sound design skills, and his sense of melody is so amazing to me.

Awesome to get mentioned on here already! 

I bet about 95% of my synth sounds are probably made in Sylenth. I like to keep my sounds simple and clean.

I'd say future bass is definitely more about songwriting than it is about sound design. Like a few people here already mentioned, adding 2nds, 4ths and 7ths to your chords will help give them a bit more depth and emotion (not just for future bass obviously). I tend to use a lot of dissonant harmonies in my chords as well, I think a lot of people aren't used to using those types of harmonies in their chords. My music teacher in high school once asked me to describe a dissonant harmony and I answered "they always sound ugly" and he said "not if you use them in the right way", and that actually completely changed the way I wrote my chords.

Also something I absolutely looooove is using nice clean sounding, slightly detuned saw (most of the time using 2 voices) synth leads for my main melodies or solos. I use an LFO to add vibrato and then I automate the gain to make it sound funkier, I also use a lot of pitch bending and/or portamento as well to give it a bit more depth. To make it sound smoother I always use a nice lowpassed ping pong delay. Highpassing out anything below 120 Hz on the leads always seems to help with that as well.

One little trick I always use is slightly bit crushing the leads to give them a little 'crunch'. If I'm using a bit crusher though, I always lowpass anything above 20K, you might not hear those super high frequencies but your dog might. Even if you're not hearing it it might still clean up your mix and bit crushers always add nasty unwanted frequencies.