Our Top Sites for Design Inspiration
Every week at Fueled, our London-based Creative Director, Rob Palmer, shares a handful of inspirational websites with our teams in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. This weekly email acts as a virtual water cooler, encouraging us to congregate across time zones and discuss what brands and blogs are doing to push new trends in web design.
B&O Play
Landing on the minimalist home page of audio product professionals, B&O Play, you don’t necessarily expect the interactive videos and photos that accompany each product. An expertly designed scroll-down system initiates the activity on each page, which ranges from short video clips to images transitioning on and off of the screen. High-quality photos on bold backgrounds create an overall chic aesthetic to highlight the luxury products. Never before has a collage of headphone parts looked so appealing.
Acme
Dubai-based storage solution provider, Acme, presents a website that feels like a guided meditation through their company and services. Entering the site through the stunning home page, with it’s heavenly view and bold motto, introduces the soundtrack for the rest of the site. This is where the meditative part comes in: the music is resonant and calming, letting you feel totally immersed in the pages that follow describing Acme’s premiere capabilities. With its crystalline photos and subtle animations to complement the bold typography and ever-soothing music, Acme’s site manages to intrigue anyone into investigating what a “storage solutions provider” really is.
Revolution.pn
Enter the site that is the officially-sponsored ode to the third film in The Hunger Games series, Mockingjay, and prepare to be fully immersed in its dystopian setting and revolutionary theme. The home page is a model for the rest of the site, with high clarity background imagery and futuristic layout of links to the other pages. Stimulation is abound throughout the site, with flashing imagery, animations, and an abundance of links to follow laid out in a random assortment on each page. Delve even deeper and the site becomes a complex web of details about all things related to this popular, novel-turned-film. Literally bounce around on the Pillars of Panem as an animated background responds to your cursor’s movements, or explore moments and characters from the film by scrolling through a mysteriously-named “Dispatches” page. You never quite know what you’re about to stumble on with each click on this site, but no matter where you end up, you’ll be treated to a multitude of interactive elements sprawled on bold, themed backgrounds.
RSVP
It’s hard to not drool over the quality leather goods featured on this site from RSVP, a Paris-based online retailer. The company, which operates as a kind of Kickstarter for luxury leather goods, has a site that is both chic and playful. The typography is stylish and simple, clearly the directing onto the appropriate page. High-quality images of the products bring color to the minimalistic white background, while the bar below the product informs visitors how much funding is still needed (aka pre-order promises) for the product to be manufactured. Clicking onto an image brings you to a page of further information and scrollable product views and angles that make you crave it even more. Simple and stylish with an approachable accent, this is a non-pretentious, luxury retailer we can get behind.
Ginventory
Ginventory is the website of an app that will transform whatever you thought you knew about gin and tonics. The entire site is a tribute to classic elegance, with a single, seamlessly transitioning page. The color scheme and imagery is simple, serving to enhance the whole user experience and bring the attention to the product being advertised. A smartphone appears on the screen once you scroll downwards, and you are treated to a visual instruction guide of using the Ginventory app. Each scroll-down brings you to a new step, with a smooth transition and classically composed typography. If we weren’t already convinced to purchase an app that would feed into our G&T addiction, this site would definitely seal the deal.
Sweet Punk
Paris-based digital agency, Street Punk, gives every visitor a sneak peek into their skills with their creative and whimsical home site. An animated screen at the top of the page highlights a few of the agency’s recent projects as a scrollable visual portfolio. More projects are listed by following the top-right menu icon, and clicking through any of these pages is an adventure on its own, with colorful images and plenty of interactive elements. A small feature on the company info page that we found far too enjoyable was what happened when our cursor hovered over the lightbulb within the company’s logo. It’s these little, exciting design features included throughout the site that elevate Street Punk to a truly higher level.
Found Them First
How many times have you heard the phrase “Yeah, I heard [insert band or singer name here] before they were famous” or you knew a little band called Kara’s Flowers before they hit it big as Maroon 5. The idea behind Spotify’s site, Found The First, is to determine how many artists you knew (or in this case, streamed on Spotify) before they reached the threshold of fame. Beyond being a fantastic concept, if not a slight ego-bruiser, the site itself is a simple yet exciting design full of bold colors and patterns. The silhouetted artists that scroll through the title screen comprise an artistic and colorful design element to accent the bold typography. The simplicity of instruction and layout makes the whole process user-friendly, while extra features like a custom-created Spotify playlist are enjoyable and unique perks.
