40 Beautifully-Designed Navigation Menus
Published in GalleriesNavigation menus are, of course, important for usability purposes and creating a user-friendly website, but they also provide opportunities to add some visual appeal to the design. In this post we’ll showcase 40 examples of attractive navigation menus, including a variety of different types and styles.
For more on navigation menus please see:
For more design inspiration please see:
82 Responses
Navigation is absolutely one of the most important parts of usability. These are some very nicely designed navigation menus.
Thanks for sharing!
WOAH! Great collection of menus. Utah Travel looks really nice. I haven’t seen most of these before. Thanks Steven.
Those are very nice navigation menus. Thanks for sharing.
Excellent collection once again.
For me, Utah travel had some promise, but the menu is seriously broken in Safari 4.0.4/10.6.2.
Thanks
navigation is main part of website and this is a really nice designs for navigation
great menu design collection it will be very helping for web designers
thanks
OH! How nice! I love the typejockeys’ navigation menu! Thanks for sharing.
Beautiful collection. I need a post like this. Useful! Thanks for the sharing!
great collection
thanks
Great collection, thanks for sharing. I’ve tried to use some of the concepts shown here in the primary nav on my site. So much inspiration here makes me want to redesign again!
Impressive
thanks…nice collection
Really beautiful collection.
thanks nice and good collections …. gr8
Excellent collection of navigations. You can really set the standards for a great design once you have a fantastic navigation . Thank you
Thats the cool collection …
Cool post.. some really good examples
Really nice inspiration, I love the Delete and Type Jockey designs.
Some are diamonds, will certainly inspirate me to use them in upcoming website’s.
Thx
Navigation is enormously one of the the majority important parts of usability. These are several very nicely premeditated course-plotting menus.
Ecosimply is very, very nice. I go download it. Thank you.
Thanks for including my site, it’s an honor to be included with the others. Really like the Utah Travel site, very well done.
Great collection – definitely helps to see highly creative navigation structures when having to create a new one myself.
I’ll shamelessly list this navigation structure that I built for Cupcakes Actually which I believe turned out well. My inspiration for it was twofold. First, cake fondant. Second, ribbons.
I really like what Robert Alan did with his site’s navigation. It’s very simple visually, but I think it’s neat how the caption bubble graphic breaks out of that horizontal plane below. Good contrast.
Great collection – thanks for collating them all together. You guys make my job so much easier
Cheers!
Really nice navigation menus here.
You Always inspiring me
Like This !!
Thanks for this resource for dropdown menus.. Great templates to work off of!
This is awesome. Thanks for the tips.
Wow, this was a particularly useful article — these summary articles are so useful to get really really quick inspiration — I scroll rapidly down them until I see something I like, then bookmark any that look like they contain ideas that are compatible with anything I’m working on. This sort of ‘ideas cloud’ all goes into the mix when tweaking aspects of a design.
wow, I will design my site this way now,hahahaha
Thanks man! Really cool collection. It would be very usefull for me!
Almost all of the designs exceed my own creative skills. They are beautiful and impressive. But I must note, that when I disabled the images on several of these sites, the navigation was no longer visible or usable. That’s a little disappointing.
Very nice set of inspirational designs, really creative ways of doing menus
Great collection. I can see the growing popularity of subheadings for menu items.
Thanks for the inspiration!
I really liked the The Creative Dot.
Its very cool
Well, thank you for the inspiration. We’re doing it the same way and we’re putting a little bit of usability spices
really nice navigation menus here, it must have taken you such a long time to collect them all, thank you for your hard work and for sharing
Very interesting. Thanks for the tips.
I don’t know why some of these are featured on here as it seems I have seen them many times before. However, there are plenty of original gems in here. Thanks.
Awesome list. Thanks
My vote is for the Creative Dot. Excellent icons, clean design.
Another brilliant bit of inspiration for the rest of us! Thanks for doing all the hard work and compiling such a great gallery.
Excellent collection, thanks for sharing ! Here is another example of simple navigation using LavaLamp effect in jQuery: http://www.studioweber.com – minimal, clean layout.
I love the way W3C did their new site. For the longest time they had a very skimpy site when it came to design and now they have finally done themselves justice with their new design. I saw you had their nav on your list and want leave my opinion.
Thanks
Great List!
Thanks for collecting these together for us!
I love http://www.saulcraviotto.com.Simple, but different.
Very good examples and definitely a great source of inspiration. Thanks for the list!
Nice Collection! Thanks for putting all of them together !
Now one can fine navigation menus related inspiration in one place
Again Thanks for sharing!!!
Thanks for this beautiful collection.
Nice collection, very inspirational, I added to my del.icio.us
you’re so nice,I really like these collection
I haven’t visited for a while, and when I do, I find this excellent set of menus to view! I always have problems with inspiration for menu ideas, and was making a similar collection myself (some of which are in here!) but your list is pretty good by anyone’s standards.
And it forms a nice update to your earlier lists from last year. Hope you make this list an annual event.
cool collection!! Thanks:D
Nice collections! Much thanks for sharing!
Nice list there. Always good to see some fresh ideas on how we can make our navigation better. After all it is one of the most important parts! Thanks guys!
Thanks for this list of websites. An inspiring very diverse.
I really liked the The Creative Dot.
Its very cool
Very good examples and definitely a great source of inspiration
Couple of really good ones there. The Tennessee Vacation and Adcetera ones really stand out for me…
This is a very nice collection of blogs. I hope to be able to find a theme that would be as good as these.
Great collection, thanks for sharing. I’ve tried to use some of the concepts shown here in the primary nav on my site. So much inspiration here makes me want to redesign again!
thanks for sharing !!! Great collection… very nice design
thanks for inspiration ! cool….
Nice inspirations for menus!