Great website design entails more than a uploading a vibrant layout, inserting dynamic features and typing in code. The most effective and admired website designs stem from forward thinking about brand strategy, color theory, copywriting, determining a target audience and devising a social media marketing plan.
Website Designs that Beautifully Bolster Brand Recognition:
View the great website design examples below, featured in the PRINT Regional Design Awards, that aesthetically reflects an entity’s missions, services and products. We admire how the designers combine creativity with analytical strategy to build a visually satisfying and functional site.
MOMA’s Interactive Website DesignBy Second Story
MOMA, Museum of Modern Art, hired Second Story to create this dynamic interactive site. It engages vistors with their artists’ history from their Inventing Abstraction exhibition and reinforces MOMA identity by maintaining MOMA’s color scheme and art appreciation mission.
Second Story’s website reveals the objective of the Inventing Abstraction website design: “Between 1910 and 1925, a community of artists emerged, brought together by a desire to ‘lay bare the abstract,’ as Vasily Kandinsky wrote. The Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with Columbia Business School, mapped the interpersonal links between ninety-two early abstract artists. This website extends the museum experience, presenting a dynamic, 3D diagram of the connections between the artists. As visitors interact with the diagram, they can explore detailed networks, view artist portfolios, and draw their own conclusions about influence, impact, and invention.”
Black Powder Tavern IdentityBy TWIST Creative
TWIST Creative’s mission: “Raising Spirits since 1746: Building a 270-Year-Old Brand from Scratch,” for Select Restaurant’s Black Powder Tavern.
The creative agency first conducted an audit on the restaurant, then, according to their site, “recommended Select enhance recognition of one of the location’s greatest assets: its location and its historic structure. The restaurant is housed in a building built in 1746. While it was originally a stage coach stop and tavern on the journey Westward, it is most famous for its proximity to Valley Forge and rumored to have played host to the bent elbows of our nation’s founder and his top commanders.”
TWIST Creative’s site regales of the cooperation between them and their client to effectively rebrand the restuarant, leading to an increase in the restaurant’s revenue. “Working closely with the Select Restaurant team’s vision for a modern gastropub with a focus on community and sharing, TWIST built an origin story around the legend and created the name Black Powder Tavern (for its legend as a munitions storage during the Revolutionary War).”
Travel Belize Website Designby Olson
“Belize isn’t fancy, and that’s why visitors love it. Our work celebrates Belize’s unpolished authenticity and beauty, all to engage travelers, not tourists.To build the Belize brand, we started with design grounded in anthropology and have been inserting the country into national conversations through social media.” – Olson on Travel Belize Website Design
The fully responsive site establishes a powerful ethos for Belize and allures visitors to the country. It includes appealing videos about all the activities Belize offers, a clever play on the word “be” and supplies destination guides.
King SolutionsCreated by Westwerk
“King Solutions was looking to update and streamline its website to complement the new brand identity (courtesy of FAME). Our challenge was to help King distinguish itself from competitors by showcasing the human component of the shipping giant.This was accomplished through use of cutting-edge design and the very latest in HTML/CSS techniques to ensure King’s content was as standout as its reputation. We crafted a modern, responsive single-page site that combines full-width black and white background images with the new striking color palette. All of this built on an easy to use CMS system fit for a King.” – Westwerk.
5 Every Day App and Website Designby Public-Library
Public Library handled the tasks of designing 5 Every Day’s identity, iconography, creative direction and creating both the OS app and website. The bold use of color embraces the app’s fun objective of finding five things to do every day in the city of Los Angeles.
Yello Branding and Website Designby Deksia
“Making Yello appear to be an approachable, easy-to-use service was our main priority. We wanted to make Yello as basic as possible to make the experience of renting a roll-off dumpster less intimidating.” – Deksia
Colorama by Fiesta Web Designsby MarketSpace Communications
“MarketSpace took Homer Laughlin China’s retro brand to a unique interactive space with the creation of Colorama by Fiesta®. This interactive table setting tool allows users to mix and match colors and products of a typical table setting.MarketSpace concepted, wrote, designed and developed the custom backend technology for this digital tool. Then, we used social media to promote the tool, leading with Facebook. Within the first day, it already had more than 600 likes, 200 shares and 50+ comments, reaching their social media audience of nearly 20,000 people.” – MarketSpace Agency
Monroe Workshop Website Design and Brand Identityby Sarah Rainwater Design
“Monroe Workshop is a furniture company that offers modern classics built by hand in Los Angeles. Their branding emphasizes the upscale quality while a hand drawn logo reflects the uniqueness of each piece.” – Sarah Rainwater
The Jade Hotelby Mucca Design
“A boutique hotel in the heart of NYC’s Greenwich Village, the Jade Hotel embraces the romance of the city’s history, when traveling was an adventure and phones were rotary. We partnered with Gemini Hospitality Group to develop a branding strategy that leverages the increasing value placed on local and authentic travel experiences. The end result is a brand identity that evokes the charm of a bygone era in every aspect of the guest experience—from the facade signage and interior wayfinding, to room keys and door hangers, as well as a robust hospitality website.” – Mucca Design
Yumblebee Website and App Designby Squires & Company
“A name like Yumblebee deserves an equally fun and playful logo design that combines the social aspects of the app into something immediate and iconic. The resulting mark is charming and distills the personality of the brand instantly and endearingly.” – Squires & Company
To find more creative design inspiration, check out the 2014 Regional Design Awards Galleries!
The Regional Design Annual is the industry’s most prestigious and well-respected American design competition. As the only comprehensive survey of U.S. design by region, tens of thousands of art directors, studios an
d creative professionals look to the RDA every year to find the country’s top talent.
In 2015, Print is celebrating 75 years. Enter your work today for a chance to be spotlighted in the pages of our milestone RDA issue.