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 good one should’have been a problem), that is illustrative to the matching section’s overall essence. When you click on a tab, it kind of melts down joining a thin line that works as a divider between contents and navigation.

A little graphic treat: Life’s logo slighlty and very slowly changes color, covering a large spectral range.