25 Outstanding Magazine Style Website Designs
Published January 19th, 2009 in GalleriesOne 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.
For more design inspiration, see:
80 Responses to “25 Outstanding Magazine Style Website Designs”
I really like some of these! There are some great examples of design to be had.
Very nice collection – magazine themes will only continue to grow in popularity over the next year or two – hard to pull off, they require a lot of work to look nice.
There awesome, i really want to design my own magazine theme for wordpress! one day.
Brandon,
I agree that this is a difficult type of design. I think that’s why I respect good examples of magazine style sites more than most other types.
Wow! Thank you for compiling this! This will be my first site to browse for magazine designs. Thank you.
Wow – what a handy overview! A rating system would be funny here.
Great collection!
yes truly inspirational,
i will start designing with these layouts in mind, and release the theme/template for free
Nice roundup. I like Boxwish and Macalicious
I like Portfolio and TheHotMag. Great list.
Most of them I’ve familiar with. I like Space Collective. Thanks!
I really like this style at the moment, and am considering using this style for a client that only requires a static content site – I think it will work based on the client’s business.
Anyway, thanks for the further inspiration!
Great roundup! Really a good source of web design inspiration.
very nice designs
nice collection, I like “magazine styles” thanks..
Yes, I think magazine style pages and portals are pretty hard to create – need to choose between usability and good design. Good looking.
UX is pretty confusing.
But Good is good.
they all look exactly the same – how about some variety?
I have tried to incorporate some of these sytles and techniques into our site. Let me know what you think
http://www.LuxuryAutoDirect.com
brzy56,
I don’t think they all look the same, but everyone’s entitled to their opinion.
Nice! I’ve been working on my magazine for a while now and it’s nice to see some more designs to see how the envelope has been pushed in other arenas. Thanks!
http://www.nogoodz.com
Wow some awesome design, i like the 1st one “Clutch Magazine”
I’m a huge fan of http://www.lifelounge.com
Nice Collection of Magazines. i like it
Wow, really great list. I really love The Morning News, one of my favorite and inspiring Web sites of all time.
Is UX Magazine still an active website? All the content on it is from 2007.
I love magazine style layouts. Thanks for posting this.
Chris,
I don’t know. I’m not really familiar with the site other than checking out the design.
I am not seeing a whole lot of unique creativity from a lot of these. There are a few nice ones, but as a whole I would say they lack true creativity.
the ones i liked: Space Collective, UX Magazine, & Good
the more i look at it, the more i like them
a good inspiration for my web magazine! thanks a lot, unfortunately I made my redesign before I saw this!
Some great examples of excellent design work there – well found!
Just wanted to say that this blog is one of the few that I have found that makes fewer posts, but those posts are of higher-quality than other blogs on this topic. I’ll definitely be looking at some of these designs for inspiration.
Awesome list, thanks for posting..I got inspiration for my V2 of my portfolio.
Spectacular, unique and professional these designs aim a little higher than to be simply blogs. They lack the boring and dry first impression of most other online “magazine” style themes. Sometimes it IS fun to look at the pictures! I like how the print “personality” of Vanity Fair and People Magazine are so aptly extended in these designs (& in the case of People, expanded upon). More please?
I surveyed the available free and commercial wordpress magazine themes before implementing one of my first wordpress projects using the relatively simple Mimbo 2.2 theme. You have to enter category id codes into the php files, which the ‘Reveal IDs for WP Admin; plugins helps identify in the later wordpress versions. Some fancy/commercial magazine provide a settings for that spares one patching code.
Some common distinctions of magazine themes:
* Images in the home page entries.
(plugins like “get-the-image ” or “Thumbnail For Excerpts” can add this to any theme)
* Featured/Header post display on home page
* “Stickey” posts that persist on the home page
* Multiple content columns
Mimbo offers a headline post, a column of features images, 1 per category, and a second column for the latest entry for each of a selected set of categories.
Notice that all the articles in the designs are accompanies by thumbnail graphics. I’ve noticed that almost ANY newspaper or magazine design with abundant thumbnails is considered great design by the reader. Whether it’s true or not, I don’t know. I know that obtaining images for every article is very difficult if you don’t have the license or money to acquire the license.
Astralis,
I think there is some truth to that. Images do help to make the site look more appealing. I think the level of difficulty of getting images that you can use legally depends partially on your subject matter. Getting pictures of celebrities, for example, that are not copyrighted I would imagine is pretty difficult. But look at Freelance Switch. they use a photo from Flickr with a Creative Commons license on every post.
I REALLY like http://www.db-artmag.com made by http://www.absoluto.de. This is one of the best magazines when it comes to art – even though it is sponsored by Deutsche Bank.
Nice Work! thnks!
I really like some of these. I’m looking around to get some inspiration to design a magazine theme for a sports news web site. Thanks!
Hi..
Wow impressive list, i really love some of these.Now a days magazines style layouts are becoming popular.
I am, looking forward for more of these so would be coming back for more later.
Thanks..
John..
Nice! I’ve been working on my magazine for a while now and it’s nice to see some more designs here. Gives me a lot of Ideas
Fantastic, I love see that! Beatiful examples.
Great list! Especially love the Black Book one.
You should check out a magazine site we did last year http://collidemagazine.com
a very nice collection. some of them are really outstanding.
We are at the proposal stage for a magazine site and it’s always helpful to see what’s happening in the space. We love Drupal but our increasingly drawn to Wordpress for entry-level sites that deliver. Thank you for this great post.
Check out mspmag.com
Very nice collection, I’m trying to design a ‘magazine’ website myself at the moment, it’s going to be difficult to pull off but will _hopefully_ be worth all of the hard work.
Wonderful, they’re beautiful. I love all of them especially the Clutch Magazine.
These on-line magazine websites are outstanding! I’m trying to find one in wordpress myself. Personally, I like Clutch. Everything an on-line magazine should be.
Thank you for this, what a great inspiration!!
Would you have any suggestions for a designer who could produce something appropriate for a publication for a small business?
Susan
nice collection.
thanks for this post.
Good post, very nice selection of designs. I particularly like the Ad Age. Thanks.
I really like most of these sites they are clean and simple yet stylish. Can anyone suggest a good platform to use to build a mag site?
OCEZINE,
WordPress and Drupal are good choices. Both are free and open source so it can keep the cost down as compared to using a custom built CMS.
I really like this style at the moment, and am considering using this style for a client that only requires a static content site
Great collections. I like most of them. Thanks for sharing.
Wow ! What a Great List of magazine websites. Simple Awesome. The more i look at it, the more i like them.
These sites inspire me to developer better websites.
I like blogs that post things about websites like this. It very easy to find and they’re good refereces for my classes that I teach. Please don’t take these posts down.
BEN PECK // benpeck.com
design / interactive / art direction
Fantastic, I love see that! Beatiful examples.
Hey Nice One….
Great Collection of Style sheet Magazine buddy..
Thank you so much for adding The New Yorker Magazine, It is one of my favorite one.
Great Job!!!
Litmusonline
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