Must Design

Designing a good website that accommodates a lot of content is a tricky balancing act to pull off. Does one attempt to present the user with all the information

• Cleartrip.com (Travel)
  
• Paytm.com (Walmart like e-retailer)
  
• Myntra.com (Abercrombie-like online store)
  
• Zomato.com (Foodie)
  
• Flipkart.com (Walmart like e-retailer)
  
• iXiGO.com (Travel)

Indian web design is marked by innovation, clear Calls-To-Action and graceful use of current and future technology. "In India my generation," my friend Ravi told me the other day, "went right to mobile skipping laptops and desktops altogether".

I was looking at these sites with my laptop and expect they look great on smart phones too. Nothing like having must of your customers using mobile tech to make mobile first in both responsive templates and impressive data architecture (easy to see how these sites would accordion in mobile.

The foodie site Zomato.com lives up to its great name. The content, despite their not being "here" yet, is fresh, beautiful to look at and engaging. Zomato is about FOOD and, much like India herself, has few preconceived notions about what that means. .

Instead they curate with clear passion and grace. Every Indian site we studied had a clear sense of GET TO IT many American sites could learn from. Indian web designers know how to "tease", charm and win clicks by providing just the right information at the right time.

Many American designers seek to overwhelm and thus end up speaking to themselves about themselves. Better to box not look for the haymakers we seem to love so much here these great Indian web designed sites illustrate.

In this article, Kendra Schaefer examines the things all web professionals should know before swan-diving into the Chinese market, including how mobile-only social platforms have become the revolutionary new frontier of Chinese web design, and who’s designing beautiful websites in China today.

Design Is Revolutionary
Don't have to be Steve Jobs to know design is revolutionary. Our Web Design Revolution feed on Scoop.it is one of our favorites. We love THINKING visual because most of us (save one poor CTO) are marketing geeks who visualize in our sleep.

If you visualize in your sleep consider contributing a Scoop or two or three to The Web Design Revolution in 2015. Several easy ways to contribute:

1. If you are on @Scoop.ituse the Suggest Feature. We appreciate all the great suggestions we've already received and promise a new focus on collaboration in 2015.

2. If you aren't on Scoop.it you are missing one of the best "do less, get more" tools we know, but you can still contribute ideas for stories we should include by:

email: martin(at)Curagami.com

Twitter: @Curagami

Call For Help NOW
Right now we are interested in creating a year-end mashup of all the web design predictions for 2015. If you have a favorite prognosticator and they write about what they think is going to happen in web design next year send us the link and we will mash your contribution up into a summary with early views going to contributors.

Thanks for a great year and hope you will contribute to The Revolution in 2015.

Flat Design Rocks Mobile
Flat web design looks great on any device so it is one of he hottest trend i 2014. My faves from this group of great flat designs:

StashIcons
VeloSport (more because I'm a cycling nut)
Bollox

Flatness in and of itself doesn't make a web design look good on mobile. Responsive design is the holy grail of platform agnostic design. Responsive + Flat more powerful than either of those ideas alone.

Responsive Web Designs
Responsive design, forming a website's information so it looks great on any device, is becoming mission critical. Here are 65 of the best responsive designs in 2014 via SocialDriver.com.

Details of the website as featured within CoolHomepages web design inspiration gallery.

Marty Note
Blue is a great color. There is a reason blue is many of your visitor's favorite color. Online blue is soothing, easy on the eyes and beautiful against black. My favorite is the UK design "un.titled.co.uk" (used as the image above).

Love using opacity to "hide" things in plain view as that kicks in the curiosity of visitors and gets the click. Current Un.titled site isn't as interesting or special as the design noted here. . Love blue online and these examples show why.

Beautiful Unusual Navigation Designs for Inspiration. Selection of Awwwards websites with a strong presence of unusual navigation. An effective navigation design is crucial for a website

Red is one of the most used colors out there. Among other things it symbolizes passion and courage  and it has a strong visual impact. Numerous designers implement it in their work either in logos, backgrounds or other website elements. In today’s article we have selected 45 web designs using the color red in various …

Reading an article entitled 10 Rock Solid Website Layout Examples on Design Shack.

There are hundreds of websites launched in every day and mostly web design are available in CSS Website Galleries for awards, reviews and inspiration for web

Minimalism has been a popular website design style for years. It has so many benefits; minimalist sites load faster, take fewer server resources, and are often faster to develop than more graphically complicated designs. Plus, they give a professional, clean impression to visitors. Many people still view minimalist designs as ... Continue reading »

The Internet has given rise to a slew of networked communities. User profile pages have become the norm for cloned systems such as Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and others. This trend has converted even the most basic websites into social havens for users.

Below I have cataloged 26 of the best profile designs found on the web. These feature tons of advancements including block stats, avatars, profile names, and a few other nifty features. Let us know your thoughts on the design gallery in our discussion area below.

Mary Note 
 

User Profiles & Community

Community is a CSF (Critical Success Factor) for e-commerce success in today's crowded and noisy web. Sharing your site with customers is a great way to begin to build an online community. 

 These 30 designs share best practices in user profiles today and some don't suck (Plurk, Vimeo). None is breathtaking or outstanding. Common and important elements for community building include:

* Picture
* Following / Follower Stats
* Bio
* Links out to social nets
* Summary of user actions on  the site
* Badges or other social status definitions

If you have a favorite user profile please share as we're working on creating one for a client now. Thanks, Marty 

People don’t judge a book by its cover, do they?Of course they do.Whether it’s the presentation of your food at a fancy restaurant or the latest Apple product, humans just seem to love things that ...

Parallax scrolling is a popular design technique used on websites in order to create an illusion of movement on the screen, to help engage website visitors and move visitor yes where you want them AND parallax scrolling plays beautifully on mobile devices!.

Here are 60 examples of great parallax scrolling.

Cyber-Duck are an award winning London digital Web Design agency. We can offer a full professional service from web design to programming web technologies

Marty Note
Watching the excellent HBO Documentary about James Brown Mr. Dynamite made me think of FUNK and web design. Web design is easy to get WRONG (lol).

It is tricky to design online with a sense of surprise, beauty and novelty. I like the Digital Invaders design as it feels free and spontaneous. Other designs such as Monster CSS and Creative With A K feel like they are trying to appear spontaneous and free.

Trying too hard is EASY in web design too. Remember all websites are STAGES we designers SET. The trick is to set a stage that feels like it is happening now and won't feel dated tomorrow. Feels like there are enough visual hooks in Digital Invaders it would be easy to keep it fresh with minimum fuss.

I like Emigre too. Emigre creates the same sense of happening now but that design is at the other end of the spectrum from Digital Invaders. Its hard to beat the grid. First website I created, in 1999, used a Mondrian grid.

Grids help organize massive amounts of information without that mountain feeling like it is about to crush you. I like the funky NOISE contrasted to the quiet grid because they demonstrate the need to find a visual VOICE in your web design. That voice can be anything as long as it feels authentic TO YOU.

The web is very good at finding and amplifying DISSONANCE. When you try to FUNK IT UP and aren't really funky it shows like you are wearing the wrong decades fashion (painful). Your customers are your audience.Set the stage anyway you want, but do so with an eye toward YOUR TRUTH.

The closer you stay on the tiny beam of "authentically us" the more success your web design has. This is why there are no web design maxims that apply all the time. What works for Emigre is very different than Digital Invaders but both work, both are authentic and have that hard to describe but know it when you see it TRUTH great web design must have.

Best Black & White Web Designs
Color is a tough master. Color sends many conscious and unconscious messages. Some websites strike out to create beauty with a simple palette.

Using only black and white these web designs show how powerful those two colors can be. Favorites include Sofa and Marck Ecko.  

Marty Note
Red is an IMPOSSIBLE web design color except when it isn't. There is an excellent comment at the end of this post sharing the best red websites:

Ashley Pajak Comment

If you spend enough time online, it's surprising how much most websites start to look alike. Sure, there are variations, but to a large extent, web design is

Color & Texture
This share bucks the flat monochrome color trend being driven by mobile, but its hard to deny the sensual impact of just the right color and texture as in Paid to Exist and other examples here. Brilliant.

Flat web design has been a huge topic in the web, even Apple is adopting flat web design style and you need to make sure you upgrade your site too!