For those who don't know, I'm also the guy behind Best Web Gallery and N.Design Studio. In 2006, I started Best Web Gallery as a gallery site where I feature the best CSS and Flash sites. I'm glad that I started the project because it gives me the opportunity to keep my design sense up-t0-the-trend. In the past year, I've seen a lot of sites from the submissions (some are great, some are horrible). As 2007 is wrapping up, I would like to share the best design sites with you. Here is a list of 50 websites hand-picked from Best Web Gallery — Best of CSS Design 2007.
Capture the Valley
Beautifully designed single page site.
Squawk Design
Impressive design by a graphic arts student, Dominik Lenk.
Holiday To Go
Love the red color applied on the tinted background.
Team Green
The torn paper and grunge effects are nicely put together. If you like my previous artistic design collection, you will like this site.
Radiant Plumbing
How can a plumbing website be so artistic (check out the header artwork)? If the contrast on the text area is higher, it would be a perfect design.
Alex Buga
Love the semi-transparent effects applied on the wood texture.
Burnett Dairy
Very cooperative, yet friendly.
Variable
Another artsy site.
Pixelmator
A Mac application site with nice icons and layout structure.
Jon Tan
Good use of web typography and grid layout.
Scrapblog
A beautiful web-app frontpage.
Marius Roosendaal
Single page portfolio site of Marius Roosendaal. Don't forget to check out both "Day" and "Night" theme.
Trale
I particularly like the details spent on the typography of Trale.
Sarah Hyland
Very well-done on the header design.
Eye Candy
Mmm yummy... both the design and chocolate bars. Another good design site powered by WordPress.
RealaSponse
Nice 2-column homepage.
Flame Digital
Very unique layout structure and nice background images throughout the site.
Tickerville
I like the design a lot, but I'm not sure if this design/style work for a financial related site.
Webstock
New Zealand's web conference website.
Cabedge
Simple, clean, and comfortable layout.
I Love Typography
A blog by John dedicated to typography.
Shylands
Simple, large bold font, great color contrast...
Superawesome
Very unique illustration style and color theme.
Happy Cog
A classic beautiful site.
Free People
One of my favorite ecommerce sites. The amount of details spent on this site is incredible.
Wish Tree
The wish/tag cloud in the background is simply creative!
Biola Undergrad
Another artsy design.
Viget Labs
Nice use of Javascript and CSS (I mean the scrolling effects).
Svenigson
Very clean and boxy layout.
Stuff and Nonsense
Site of Andy Clarke.
J R Velasco
Designed by Miguel Ripoll (one of my favorite designers). He has great sense of web typography. The layout looks very chaotic, yet the content is organized.
Explore Cascadia
One word, beautiful.
Yellow Stone Park
A very nice design within the box.
Elliot Jay Stocks
A design blog by Elliot Jay Stocks. He is a very talented designer with great personality (based on my personal conversations with him).
Freelance Switch
Good design and great content (freelance related).
Knoxville
Retro style in collage form.
Electric Pulp
I'm loving the watercolor effects.
Vivabit
I'm not a big fan of liquid design, but this is a good one.
Surfgarden
Nice and clean 2-column blog design.
Tanya Merone
Another great example of single-page site.
Matt Brett
A nice design blog by Matt Brett, he is a designer gamer.
Larissa Meek
A beautiful blog design by Larissa Meek, formerly a model, now she is an art director at AgencyNet.
Noodle Box
Nice use of color contrast.
Kineda
A blog by Terry and Tami Ng (celebrity and entertainment news).
Pod3.tv
Another nice design blog.
Kev Adamson
Another sketchy design.
Eleven3
Another retro/collage approach.
Turbo Milk
Nice icon.
Veerle's Blog
Another classic beautiful blog.
31three
Blog and design portfolio of Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain.
Hey Nick, thanks for making and sharing this list! (:
Awesome list, there are some really great and inspirational sites on that list. I really loved every single one on there for different reasons. An awesome collection for inspiration going into 2008.
Too bad none of the sites I have designed made the list.
Nick, with all the CSS Showcase websites showing all kinds of nice designs they have nothing compared to this 1 great inspiration list, great job :)
Beautiful designs, beautiful code :)
Hi nice collection of fine designes :-) Thanks for sharing!
Hey Nick, Thanks for sharing of these nice and very inspirational links :)
Noodlebox is 2005, not 2007 … ;)
Cool, thats a very good list a few i wouldn’y have on there a few i would have added but every one has a unique opionin.
What a fantastic list nick!. I wish i could be on this list though:D my site design is not that bad either.
kidding!
Niiiice!!
The Miguel Ripoll site is one of my favourite web sites ever.
There is one site you’ve missed that should definitely be on the list : http://www.webdesignerwall.com (”,) – I know it’s your own site but I vote it goes on …
Knoxville really looks cool! Thanks for the list.
These sites are amazing! They are really really cool!
Some of them have provided me with some cool links in return! Thanks!
Those are some definitely nice CSS sites! Thanks for sharing.
Lots of “pretty” sites. I prefer usable.
First, sorry I’m posting here, but I’ll be gratefull if you read this.
Hi! I was always working in Photoshop only, but now I’m gonna train in Illustrator, so I’m currently blue about it.
I got a question related to one of your preview post: http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/illustrating-the-flower-pattern/
When you’re done with tracing something in Illustrator – how do you throw it to Photoshop? I mean – how do you save it in Illustrator (what file format, options) in cause to import/open it in Photoshop and polish?
Thanks in advance for you reple on my question above.
P.S. Sorry if my english is hard-understanding, I’m from Poland and I don’t know the graphic terminology.
P.P.S. I can’t work out the size of the document in Illustrator, the work space of the document. I choose pixels as a unit, type a custom esolution 1024×768, but when the document appears I’m confused :). But I’ll work it out.
great stuff. a lot of inspiration for new projects.
bestwebgallery is the shit!
First off all I like all sites shown here, but, “Capture the Valley” site has one thing that I don’t like, and that is poorly marked links… don’t know about you, but it took me some time to click on the right text link. But hey, It’s just me. All the sites look awesome, especially webdesignerwall.com, it’s simple, fun to look at and to use.
Thanks for inclusion in this list, I love the other designs posted. Also I should mention that Web Designer Wall is such a stunning site itself. I worked hard to make Tickerville atypical looking in respect to other financial sites and it was fun to immerse myself in an earlier time period. I’m still learning a lot with CSS (I come from a Flash background), and my admiration for CSS grows with each experience I have with it. Also I’d like to say thank you to Stephen Slater (no web site to reference) who helped me with a lot of CSS advice and testing on Windows :)
i like 31three~~“`