Successful website designs are more than just a combination of the typography, color pallet, and images used. Instead, they are those websites that really draw in the viewer, from the opening slides of the site to the exiting, to the cleverly designed link options. In addition to all of that, every great website has to be unique, an original among its contemporaries. With that in mind, here are three of our favorite websites at the moment, each of them brilliantly designed and great places to draw inspiration from for you next site design project.
Cubo: With a homepage featuring a background of a grayscale seemingly unfinished architectural project, this website is actually anything but monochromatic in tone. Following several of the link options provided on the first page will lead to pages with a brilliantly designed red background. Perhaps one of the most outstanding features of Cubo is its transitions; while some transitions provide a simple vertically positioned screen change, others reveal that the homepage is just one side of an apparent cube which rotates to reveal another side that corresponds to whatever tab has just been clicked.
Unfold: This website veers away from the traditional webpage design and the result is amazing. Instead of building up separate pages for each section of the site, a scroll down on the side bar will bring viewers to the different sections of this site. As you scroll, however, the site’s graphics run through delightful transition fazes, given a clearer meaning to the title “Unfold.†Additionally, a complete scroll through of the entire site will automatically bring you back to the beginning of the site—a feature which might be confusing at first but makes perfect sense in the long run. For anyone who wishes to go right to a certain part of the site without a complete scroll through, however, traditional section tabs can also be clicked on to bring one directly where they wish to go.
Puma Africa: We really just can’t get enough of this stellar website design. The home page features a simplistic Africa-esque graphic which rotates when you stay on the page long enough. Catchy tunes play in the background that just make you want to do a little dance at your desk. Clicking on any of the links at the bottom of the page causes the home page graphic to be zoomed out of and brings in some new graphic display; for example, clicking on the “history†tab will lead you to a new page with nothing but a mountain, moon, small representation of a cityscape shown on the home page, and a timeline. Further clicking on dates on the timeline alters the appearance of the lines on the screen. Through the entire website the same tan toned color scheme is used, brining unity to the whole site. Perhaps the most inspirational part of this website is found under the “football†tab, which leads viewers to a great video and graphics detailing football (soccer) in the continent of Africa.
