10 Best Designed Websites in The World
This is my pick of 10 outstanding web sites. It's my personal preference, and you don't have to agree, but I'll try to explain why these designs are great.
This is my pick of 10 outstanding web sites. It's my personal preference, and you don't have to agree, but I'll try to explain why these designs are great.
Apple is the best example of striking the balance of simplicity (white space, strong type) with rich imagery sensitively-applied.
It’s also a big, varied, constantly-new site with loads of content, which always feels easy & enjoyable to navigate.
For solving the numerous demands on the UI so elegantly, this is, in my opinion, the best-designed web site in the world today.
Clear, open, fresh, simple. When you arrive at this site, you’re under no doubt what the site does, or where to start looking for what you want. The design is positive and happy. A winner.
The site sells icons, so it lets the icons rule, showing its wares from the first page.
The colours and typography are solid & strong, projecting a trustworthy brand while not getting in the way of the proposition.
“Why We Whisper – restoring our right to say it’s wrong” is a book about freedom of speech in the USA, written by Senator Jim DeMint and J. David Woodward.
The page design is a great example of pixel-saving in action, with very little complexity going into the page background (chrome), leaving room for large, clear type. I love the flourished rules between the quotes.
If I have one criticism, the page doesn’t tell you up-front what it’s about.. relying on prior knowledge or even reading, which may be a lot to ask.
Another very worthy simple & impacting book site is “Gangs of America.com”, book by Ted Nace.
The guy’s an illustrator, so his site has to:
It does both these things really well!
The graphic design is designed around Alex’s work, with intelligent typography and just enough pixels used to give the site background its tattered, rich vibe.
I love the way his portfolio page uses gradients to suggest the work in a print context.
Another icon maker, doing bigger, richer icons, so the the site showcases them bigger & richer.
Bold, flattish colour creates a strong first impression and still lets the product stand out.
Tony Yoo’s collection of recommended web resources is a great example of strong graphic elements balancing to make a site that’s bold and easy to use.
Big text, simple nav, high usability, all wrapped in strong colour and finished off with nice graphical touches.
Another illustrator’s site (Kevin Cornell). What can I say about this that I didn’t say about Alex Dukal’s site?
It embodies the essence of Kevin’s style, and – if you look – does an excellent job of filling the space with content, needing almost no page furniture at all.
Count how many things on the page are both navigation and content. Everything has had the touch of the illustrator’s brush, so the site is just saturated with his talent.
Dan Cederholm’s personal wine review project provides a neat, cleanly-designed interface, featuring an intelligent colour scheme and fantastic simple logo.
Easy to use and fun to browse. This site strikes the balance just right.
Oh so 2.0, but I just love it. You know what gets me every time? Acres of balanced white space, easy-read text and cute content graphics combining to tell a simple story. First-rate.
Tags: popular
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Great list! I obviously wouldn’t place them all in the same order, but yours is pretty cool! Check out my list at: http://blog.webconstructions.net/2010/05/top-10-website-designs.html.
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[...] Hunt, an acclaimed web designer at http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com, wrote an article about the 10 best web designs on the internet. Here’s Ben’s list of the top ten [...]
I think that a properly title for this site would be “10 best ENGLISH designed web sites in the world” .. Do you know why the Nobel Prizes (the Swedish awards) are so popular in the world? ..Because they are universal..because these prizes are not only for people who live in Sweden or people who speak only one language.
Look at the world..it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand the language , there are a lot…plenty of well designed sites that is a must to see and some of them are not in english.
Good point Alfred. I think it’s fair that my top 10 sites are in English, as my first language is English, and I need to understand a site to get its design completely (otherwise I can only appreciate its decoration). Copy is the #1 most important factor in web design, so I could not properly judge the merits of a site that is written in Greek, Portuguese, or Korean.
where can I find the date of this article and it’s writer?
Hi. This page was written by Ben Hunt in May 2009.
This is a terrible, terrible list. Terrible.
i like this list a lot!
thanks
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