25 Outstanding Magazine Style Website Designs

One of my favorite styles of web design to take inspiration from is the magazine style. Creating a well-designed site that looks good, allows for good usability, and features a lot of content without cramming items onto the page is a very difficult task.

Blog theme designers can often put some of this inspiration into practice in their own work, as blogs often face the challenge of displaying a lot of content while still trying to look good.

Clutch Magazine

25 Incredibly Artistic Websites – Part 4

Artistic and creative websites with interesting background images and/or headers seem to be more and more common all the time. I’ve done a few roundups of this style in the past, but great new examples keep popping up, so here is part 4.

Madame Surto

25 Beautifully Dark Websites – Part 3

Although most websites use dark text on light backgrounds, but sites with dark backgrounds with light text can be very striking when executed effectively. In the past, I’ve published two collections of great dark designs (see part one and part two), and here is part three.

BrandStorm

25 Websites with Lighting Effects

Lighting effects are often used in modern web design to give a site an interesting and different look. Several months ago I published 40 Photoshop Tutorials for Lighting and Abstract Effects, which includes plenty of tutorials that can help you to get this type of look in your own work. Now, I’d like to share this gallery of sites that are putting those techniques into practice.

Color Charge

50 Inspirational E-Commerce Website Designs

Many e-commerce websites aren’t the most attractive websites. There’s often a lot of clutter with little to distinguish the design from any other site. Of course, selling products is more important to an e-commerce site than having a pretty design, but these 50 examples show that some e-commerce sites display excellent design.

Morphica

35+ Websites with Minimal Color Schemes

The color scheme of a website is obviously one of the most significant design decisions that needs to be made. When it comes to color schemes, there are all kinds of possibilities. Some use a bright, colorful scheme to create an attractive website. The sites that are featured in this post are using a simple color scheme of mostly black, white and gray.

Monochromatic color schemes can be used with any color, not just black and white, but we’ll be focusing on black and white here. Most of these sites use other colors sparingly, which can be extremely effective for making certain elements stand out. Also, because the element of color has been reduced in these designs, many of them rely heavily on typography and layout structure, as you will see in those being featured.

The New Yorker

50 Gorgeous Navigation Menus – Part 2

Last week I published a collection of over 50 excellent navigational menus for your design inspiration. Because I found more examples than I used in that post, and because others seemed to share my appreciation for menu design, I’ve decided to put together a second collection.

The Worldwide Blogger Bake Off

50+ Gorgeous Navigation Menus

When I’m looking at excellent websites for design inspiration, one of my favorite aspects of design to notice is the navigation menu. While I enjoy seeing excellent designs of all types (minimal to artistic to colorful to dark) and various aspects of the site (including headers and footers), a well-designed and well-executed navigation menu can have more impact on my appreciation of a site than any other single piece of the design.

In this post I’d like to take a look at more than 50 stellar examples of navigation menus that positively impact the design of a website. The list includes a great deal of variety. Regardless of what you personally prefer, there should be some inspirational examples in here for you.

Housing Works

25 Impressive Blog Footers

Footers are often an afterthought in blog design. I know firsthand, because my footer is about as basic and uneventful as it gets. The blogs on this list are excellent examples for the rest of us that the footer can be a helpful and interesting aspect of the design.

Some of the examples shown here use visual elements to make the design of the footer more interesting, and others simply focus on providing navigation or information in the footer that will help visitors.

CSS-Tricks

25 Beautifully Colorful Websites – Part 3

Colorful websites are always a good source of design inspiration (See 25 Beautifully Colorful Websites, and 25 Beautifully Colorful Websites – Part 2). These 25 showcase designs make excellent use of color. Hopefully you’ll find at least a few for your own inspiration.

Byron Bay Schoolies