An interesting question: shaping your website menu as a navigation tree makes your website’s navigation clearer and more understandable?

Even if mega drop-down menu perform better than the regular ones (at least according to this Jackob Nielsen’s study), I still don’t love them. Except for cases like this, when, huge panels makes me understand at a glance the whole website’s taxonomy, sparing me the time of browsing endlessly from a level to another and [...]

A beautiful home page made only by infographics, that work as well as navigation system.

We have a thing for Finnish webdesign and we sure love the global appeal of this super green website, even though we don’t master Uralic-related language: the letterpress effect has definitely made its way to our favourite text style for headers and buttons, the menu layout polished to the pixel with the pointing arrow inserting [...]

A slightly embossed alphabetical menu lets you browse this website displaying tons of free fonts to download.

Pagination and main navigation links are both displayed on a beveled toolbar, duplicated at the bottom page: I think it’s really clever how Eico’s design have unified in one place back/next button, category, year, name of the project and link back to the portfolio’s home page.

A nice example of minimalist cascading menu from Kemado Records, an indipendent American record label based in New York City.

I really can’t remember why (serendipity, I’d suppose) but recently I’ve stumbled into the Gates’ notes, the website that spreads probably worldwide most famous mogul’s thoughts about the matters such as philanthropy, climats, development… Apart from the fact that the whole thing is written in the third person, which really gives me the creeps, I’ve  found [...]

Here you are a nice design snip I’ve found on Guinness website: a sleek black tab menu with many filter options clearly organized into two rows.

Though we’re not big fans of overtly tech webdesign and we prefer warmer, more organic solutions, we loved the cleanliness and the powerful, warm glow that this website’s menu radiates. Another nice design snippet we found on Thoughbot’s website is the brownish, rounded contact us button which really stands out, partly for its effective color contrast and [...]

Stupid Studio is a creative motion design and online agency based in Denmark which is specialised in motion graphics and, contrary to its name, delivers very brilliant stuff. This website is quite a living example of how a simple three colums grid, evenly repeated in each sections, can effectivly improve your website’s consistency, abating the [...]

Yellow is a powerful, cheerful colour but rarely used in webdesign because, I suppose, of its inner lack of contrast. You can find it quite likely associated with black or, as in this case with cyan, and it’s often used in design-related websites. This time, we want to show you this nice, huge yellow tabbed [...]

Quite a classic but nonetheless we loved this fresh, neat drop down menu, designed in a lovely palette with a clear, simple approach. This web design sample comes from emPivot‘s website: emPivot.com is the first online network to bring together the wide range of user generated and premium video content related to the environment. As [...]

Here you are a classy, finely shaped tab menu from Weightshift, a small studio based in San Francisco. Though we loved this web site on the whole (the typography is great and, generally, you can catch a meticulous attention behind every detail), we liked the most the quite vertically compressed menu (since the so-called web [...]

When you click on the huge button on the top of Why Every One Loves Tumblr page, you’ll see a big check list menu appearing with four differente choices. This is a peculiar way to navigate between section that I’ve seen only here but I think that may possibly turn out useful in many other situations.

A nice idea for Clearleft, a web agency specialized in user centered design: a web site menu made of numbered cards that makes a not so subtle suggestions to methods applied in Information Architecture.

Our attention was grabbed by a clever fonts comparison system in MyFonts‘ website: using a little sliding widget in the left sidebar, you can browse through thousands items, comparing the A glyph of available typefaces. You can get a more detailed preview of your type by simply hovering over the letter with your mouse.

Could you tell the difference between the breadcrumbs and the navigation? When both are displayed it’s quite obvious, but in other pages (look at here) it’s not. Though it might turn out to be a nice graphic expedient, I think it could be risky to disguise one user interface pattern (navigation menu) as another. (breadcrumbs [...]

Using different colours may lead to clashing, disorienting graphic outcomes. But I think this is not the case and we quite appreciated A S Hospitality expanding menu.

Minimalist web design it’s one of our (many) recurrent thoughts when reviewing websites. It’s really tough to come to inventive, not bare-looking solutions when you strip a website of every graphics assests and you’re not allowed to play any of the usual webdesign tricks. So we really loved this simple HTML menu, a nested list [...]

Ommwriter is a simple text processor that firmly believes in making writing a pleasure once again, vindicating the close relationship between writer and paper. The more intimate the relation, the smoother the flow of inspiration. We loved the simplicity of its vertical menu made with rounded items overlapping and the nice simple icons that are [...]

Artel is a Russian design bureau with a great logos and identities portfolio and a really nice navigation system. We loved the tab menu because of the rounded cut just above the logo and the way the single tab displays a punch card, once you click on it.

In the so-called normal web world a navigation menu is always supposed to precede pagination, but what normally rules in webdesign, doesn’t minimally affect Subnormality strip website. Hope you’ll enjoy these comics with too many words and a subversive menu in it: have an inspirational reading!

According to the website’s About page, Hitotoki is a Japanese noun comprised of two components: hito or “one” and toki or “time,” and is often translated as “a moment.” In common usage, it can be used to describe any brief, singular stretch of time (if we share a meal someday, you can call that a hitotoki). To [...]

If you’re looking for a navigation menu that does have the power of making a strong, immediate impression on your users, you can use Life magazine‘s menu as a good starting point. Menu’s buttons are displayed as big tabs framing a nice thumb (for sure at Life they’re not short on good photos, so finding a [...]

On my previous job, when I was working for a big web portal, we got used to look up to Yahoo’s interaction design as one of the most insightful example of dealing with users’ experience on a large scale audience. When you’re not able to relate to a definite target (ok, I too hate this [...]

I was firstly drawn to Mikey Burton‘s portfolio, attracted by his beautiful illustrations and identity works. Then I’ve started admiring the unparalleled simplicity of his portfolio’s navigation menu: a simple list of gray links, with an open/close ajax effect, whose aim is just helping users to browse in the most efficient way. This website’s menu [...]

Since I’m big for vectorial shapes I couldn’t help mentioning oh joy’s floreal menu. Flowers and herbs silhouettes are quite realistic drawn without any excessive flourish, keeping the website’s greenery imaginary far from beeing redundant or excessively ornamental. For further inspirational suggestions, I recommend that you have a look at Oh Joy’s Shop and Blog: you [...]

When you combine two differents web design patterns you can get either a mess or a really interesting new element: in this case, Stuff‘s menu gets a compact and solid appearence, having shifted the properties pertaining to breadcrumbs trail to the horizontal menu. As you can see, home page’s rainbowy menu (at the top of the [...]

When we first saw it, our jaws fell to the floor. Freezed, we’ve been keeping on staring at the screen, mesmerized by what our doubtful eyes were seeing. Then we burst out laughing. Then we started worrying about how one could possibly categorize this crazy web 2.0 app. The quirky idea IJML (that’s our short [...]