The ecommerce website for jewelry designer Jacquie Aiche has a clean and high-contrast monochromatic color palette, which makes it very legible. This is balanced against the colors and textures of lifestyle imagery, which breathes life into showcasing their jewelry.
The Jacquie Aiche homepage also demonstrates the power of brand video. For its campaign with brand ambassadors Adam Levine and Behati Prinsloo, which ran from April to September 2024, it created a hero video that transports you into the universe of the brand. But if you’re viewing the site with a slower Wi-Fi connection, there’s a fallback image so you’re not waiting for a large file to load and missing that initial positive experience. Its campaign imagery prioritizes continuity across channels (website, social media, etc.), which fosters a unified brand experience for its audience.
3. Justin Reed
A good ecommerce site is an immersive experience that’s authentically representative of its brand. But at the end of the day, the design should also show restraint because you ultimately need visitors to transact. The luxury resale site Justin Reed is a great example of those web design characteristics: It features a minimal design that allows customers to easily find exactly what they’re looking for.
Because more than 80% of their traffic comes from mobile devices, the Justin Reed team created a mobile-first experience with a single navigation menu on the left side of the page (rather than creating a desktop version with the menu at the top of the page). This means Justin Reed customers only have to learn one type of navigation, making the site experience familiar regardless of where they’re accessing it. With many one-of-a-kind products, the menus feature advanced filtering options so users can drill down by brand, size, and more.
4. Caitlyn Minimalist
After becoming one of Etsy’s most popular sellers, the jewelry brand Caitlyn Minimalist launched a fully customized Shopify site to build a more immersive experience. The Caitlyn Minimalist site prioritizes visual contrast and legibility, while injecting brand personality with lifestyle photography.
Regardless of your basic visual branding design elements, you can lean into experimentation with your photography. For example, Caitlyn Minimalist shifts its site imagery from season to season (e.g., “Fall into Elegance” for autumn 2024) to alter the mood—without the need for creating a completely new website each time.
5. Nikolas Type
Nikolas Type is an independent type foundry with a website full of highly interactive elements that create an engaging user experience. The site prioritizes ease of exploration. As you scroll down the homepage, the playful cursor highlights the different typefaces, altering their size and movement on hover. When you select each typeface, it opens to a page that delves into that typeface. Those pages utilize video, magnification, and in situ examples to help visitors explore their options before easily purchasing via a stylized purchase button.
These interactive elements surprise and delight site visitors. They also strategically highlight how to interact with the interface to explore, preview, and purchase the fonts on display. Plus, they immediately establish the Nikolas Type brand identity and product offerings by spotlighting the typefaces in lieu of other visual distractions.
6. Snøhetta
Snøhetta is an environmentally focused architecture and design practice with a website that encapsulates the culture of the brand. The site’s black background creates an intimate vibe for visitors, evoking the feeling you’re eavesdropping on Snøhetta’s design process imagery.
The website’s pared-down navigation menu also represents Snøhetta’s site goals at quick glance, driving viewers to explore more about the practice’s people, process, and projects. Snøhetta’s website strikes a balance of inspirational and informative, with elevated digital design elements that add personality without distracting from the core messaging and usability.
7. Unconditional Magazine
The website of women-run magazine Unconditional is a digital complement to its highly curated and artfully designed print magazine. The site evokes a sense of visual ease while engaging the viewer on an emotional level. It uses a cohesive photography aesthetic and bold hero imagery alongside clean, simple typefaces that don’t distract from the content of each piece in the digital magazine.
The large, legible navigation menu makes it easy to find exactly what you need. That search ease is paired with a curated selection of images linking to past issues and articles that encourage you to explore their content further.
8. Poor Charlie’s Almanack
The San Francisco–based book publisher Stripe Press created a fun piece of visual storytelling as a promotional tactic for a book release. This site promotes Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a collection of “the wit and wisdom of Charles T. Munger” (former vice chairman of Warren Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway).
The site pairs the practical (a grid-based design) with the unexpected, like fun 3D design elements and “Berkshire mode,” which is a nod to Berkshire Hathaway’s famously lo-fi site. With muted-color backgrounds and the same typefaces throughout, the site design creates a cohesive backbone to hold up its substantial text-based content.
Characteristics of good website design
The modern website design examples above all vary in aesthetic and purpose, but there are some design elements they have in common that you can apply to your own website:
Strong underlying patterns
Humans have a knack for pattern recognition. For that reason, sites that feel intuitive are often the ones with strong underlying patterns repeated throughout the design elements.
For example, a baseline grid, which is the vertical rhythm of a site (created by margins and padding) is an integral part of brand identity. A consistent baseline grid will feel more intuitive to users, even if they wouldn’t necessarily be able to name it.
Thoughtful narratives
A well-designed website follows a narrative: It contains all of the information the user needs, but parses it out in a way that does not overwhelm users. Each web page or section surfaces the most important information first and then provides secondary and tertiary information within close reach.
A deeper connection
A website is an opportunity to invite others to connect with your brand or company on a deeper level. It’s important that connection feels personal and emotional, rather than purely transactional.
The website design examples in this article weave their core initiatives and values into each site, starting with the homepage. This gives visitors a sense of what a brand or company is all about, which goes hand-in-hand with building trust.
Seamless user experience
User experience (UX) is an essential part of web design. Good user experience involves attention to details large and small. You need to ensure that your brand’s overall narrative and brand identity are clearly conveyed and woven throughout the site.
When site visitors have a positive experience with a website, they’re more likely to trust the brand behind it. By comparison, poor UX can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction, which will erode brand trust and damage a brand’s reputation. But if you can build a memorable positive UX, visitors might share their experience with others, boosting your brand’s word-of-mouth marketing.
Website design examples FAQ
What does the best website look like?
The best websites often look simple because they prioritize functionality. Still, they find a way to convey personality through strategic details like unique typography and evocative imagery that express a business’s brand identity.
What makes an award-winning website?
Award-winning websites are often those that find a new or unexpected way to present information without compromising the site’s core functionality. Website design awards include Awwwards, The Webby Awards, and CSS Design Awards.
