A nice way to polish your website design is to add to your footer a small but memorable illustration.

A fresh, shiny example of footer design with vibrant, intensely hued baloons and bubbles to add emphasis to texts and titles.

An unusual undulate footer painted in a pleasantly desatured palette.

If you click the scissor icon for three times, Kickstarter‘s footer literally falls down, leaving a “transparent” background.

As long as you scroll the page and make the footer appear, a dreamy “Icarus” smoothly glides from left to right.

This piece is taken from the web design portfolio and project gallery of Rhode Island based web designer Jeremy Girard.

This nice illustration fits perfectly the overall cosmic theme of the site.

A big,nicely styled skull displays if hovered over, an useful back-to-top function.

We loved the nested footer at Smartsites, a small company specialized in responsive webdesign. Actually we dig the whole website that displays an amazing attention and care in each detail: check out the about page and the worker’s profile toolbox photograph.

A shopping basket placed into the footer area, next to product suggestions and nicely enclosed in a decorative scribbled frame: brilliant!

Witty quotes fade in and out in this nice colophon displaying all the powers of css3 and html5.

In this tumblr theme, a nice green footer with a pivotal, ornamental badge, mirrors header’s shape and colours, creating an interesting visual doubling effect.

A watery imaginary brightens up Becmedia‘s website footer: very often in modern webdesign background illustrations unfold organically from the top page to the footer, unveiling increasingly as users go further down the page.

A Modern Eden is a website that will be launched on June, devoted to create iPhone apps for design-lover parents. In anticipation of what you will get this summer, you can take a look at the beautiful collection of geometric animal illustrations and at the matching snake, wrapped around the website’s footer.

Contrary to the actual webdesign trend of overbearing footers, crammed with links and sometimes not very pertinent references, Fridgework shows us the beauty of a simple five words ending (and a strategically set back-to-top button) .

Overlapping vector illustrations entwine to create a powerful pink footer.

A nice monochrome footer from laFraise, a t-shirt competition website. We love this wintry, cold blue footer with warm mouse over effects and we must admit that the shopping section is very tempting. Très joli.

Being a gifted illustrator really comes in handy when you have to enlighten your website’s footer and yes, you got me, this post was just a lame pretext for showing you Loscoloresolvidados‘ illustrations. PS: You can find really nice desktop wallpaper as well!

A heavily, in a positive way, styled footer and a fascinating tropical imagery from Komodo Media ‘s website. Apart from the stunning toucan mascot, we loved the brilliantly cd-shaped last fm widget (Jamming to).

Actually we’re big fans of Vimeo‘s website design and we HAD to mention its beautiful footer background displaying a kind of Earth-scale-model dissection with isometric characters on it.

Fatcow is an Internet provider and Web hosting service 100% powered by wind energy. We think their green efforts are absolutely worth being mentioned and we also love their ecological inspired footer.

Since here (in Italy) it’s lunch-time, we’ve been quite suspiciously inspired by Sesame footer: an urban deli shop, located in Leeds (unfortunately for us), with a nice website. Sesame grey footer includes an intricate floreal pattern with tiny magenta birds that seem to warble and trill “eat…eat…”: I think it’s definitely time for me to get out [...]

The footer of the photographic studio Symbol is visually closed by two labels containing links to Facebook and Twitter.

Sweet & Saucy is a small company specializing in the production of spectacular wedding cakes: the footer, designed in a old-fashioned style, has  funny  mixer-button-icon that carries back to the home page.

Impulse Studios footer conjugates both the functions of customers login and map site navigation.

The icon used in the footer of Firefox Add-ons page is not only enjoyable, but also suggests a sense of richness and variety of items available in this section.

Pampaneo’s footer  (on the top) closes the story of two young designers, who venture on a secret mission to discover “new world of images”: the metaphor of space exploration starts from the home page and develops consistently in the web site (eg. on the header of internal pages, on the bottom).

The footer in Fred Maya’s portfolio

Psdthemes is basically a directory of web sites themes some of which are free and I think it’s a useful resource for both aspiring and professional web designers.  The footer is organized into tabs and consists basically of a tag cloud.

The footer in Waterstone’s online shop: the use of a book and a bookmark to characterize this component is more than appropriate.