14 of the Best app Design that can inspire you the most
Each Customer interaction with your business is purely based on your brand and its visual appeal. Good Web design is an effective aspect of any online business. Since the start of this year, many new trends have emerged within the web design industry. Be it the appearance, functionality, usability, interactivity, there are examples of app designs that are pushing the boundaries. And as you start analyzing some of the app designs, you’ll come across few aspects of app designs that can draw customers’ attention effortlessly.
This article will take you through 14 of the best app designs that can inspire you the most. The intention is to familiarize you with those key aspects that went behind their app design. Interestingly, you will realize that some of the best app design software solutions are capable of making app designing process easy, effortless and time-saving.
The key highlights of this app include rich micro-interactions, hover effects, and white space. While navigating through The Cool Club, people can easily click the card box to deal cards one by one. Moreover, when they move the cursor over the words on the navigation bar, the words will shake and wave correspondingly. All in all, The Cool Club is an interesting site with a lot of micro-interactions and considerable use of white spaces that grab the users’ attention.
Your takeaway:
The micro-interaction design is quite popular among UX/UI designers. If you’re looking forward to creating an interesting and compelling app, then, we highly recommend you to include rich micro-interactions in your app’s design, along with the effective use of white space.
The internet is full of some amazing and inspiring apps.
These special snowflakes are the ones who find innovative ways to utilize every possible design and technological boundary to their advantage to create experiences that many organizations wish they had.
Finding these diamonds in the rough can be an incredible challenge, especially if you’re planning a app redesign and are unsure of where to start.
Fortunately, sites like CSS Awards, Awwwards, Webby Awards, etc. exist to help highlight the sites we should push our own to reflect.
To help showcase some of these awarding winning sites, I dove into each of these award-honoring sites and pulled the ones that are not only beautiful examples of modern design but also exercise UX, UI, information architecture, conversion rate optimization, video marketing, tactics to their fullest potential.
When looking at each site, it’s important to understand that these should not be seen as templates you should attempt to copy. Instead, analyze them and find the parts of them that utilize design/marketing/content strategies that could be repurposed and revised into something that fits your audience.
With that being said, enjoy these 17 killer examples of award-winning app designs done right.
ESPN takes its sports content and programming to the next level with this dynamic and eye-catching site filled with large, high-resolution images and video. The site utilizes background video to keep up with the sports network’s energy and sections with subtle hover and transition effects and to keep the user experience smooth. The ‘featured sports’ slider is thoroughly entrancing and does an excellent job of showcasing each of the sports alongside interesting statistics and informative details about available programs.
Montage takes showing-off its product to the next level with this easy to maneuver homepage that clearly outlines what its product is, how it looks, product quality, and testimonials. The site is an excellent example of one approach you can use to highlight your product and the most important points your users would be concerned with finding answers to. The sticky sub-navigation allows users to easily navigate around the page to find exactly what they’re looking for. A highly curated gallery of premium web design inspiration run by one man, David Hellmann. He started this side project way back in 2008, and he’s still going strong, perhaps because it also serves as David’s personal inspiration gallery.
(Which is a pretty great idea, come to think of it. Perhaps, by the end of this post, you’ll be inspired — and armed — to start building a personal inspiration gallery of your own!)
Best App Gallery, or BWG, uses a tagging system so you can quickly find sites based on their style, design approach, functionality, and more. And with over 2,000 quality apps to peruse, this comes in handy.
Why you should go to BWG for app design inspiration
Because BWG boasts an expansive, high-quality, curated gallery complete with search and a robust tagging system. It’s particularly good for:
1. Portfolio apps
If you’re the kind who likes to take part in the May 1st Reboot every year, it’s handy to have so many other designers’ online portfolios handy to steal from — I mean, get inspired by.
2. Agency apps
Agencies tend to attract the highest-caliber creatives, so their apps often rank high among the best of the best on the web. These can be inspiring not only for your own agency app, but also any client, business, or portfolio site.
3. Color inspiration
BWG gives you the ability to filter sites by color, so you can easily find a beautiful color palette that includes your client’s brand colors!
Behance’s web design discover page makes it really easy to find massive amounts of web design inspiration from their huge, diverse creative community. Toggle your search settings to specify timeframes, popularity, and/or location. For example, you can do a search for the “most appreciated web designs from the last week in Toronto, Canada” and find these results. If nothing else, it’ll give you a whole new appreciation for the size — and talent — of the world’s creative community!
Why you should go to Behance for web design inspiration
Given that Behance is part of the Adobe family of companies, it’s probably the world’s largest and most active creative community. And its extremely detailed filtering options can help you find just about anything you’re looking for, from the latest hot typography from Japan, to the most-discussed UI designs coming out of Mexico, to the best copywriting out of your own hometown.
Community-curated inspiration
Filters like “most appreciated” give you a peek into the creative collective unconscious, and ensure you see the best of the best — from the perspective of the best.
The “tools used” filter
Most inspiration sites are agnostic about the tools used in the creative process. Not so Behance, which gives you a handy way to see what people are doing with a given platform or tool with its Tools Used filter (under “Additional Filters”). Here’s the world’s most appreciated projects made with Webflow, for example.
Awwwards’ respected award system attracts submissions of the highest quality — i.e., those that continually push the borders between art and web design.
The quality of the inspiration reflects the quality of the jury. (Which includes Webflow wiz, Timothy Noah and our own Ryan Morrison.) Awwwards has enlisted the help of some of modern web design’s best to judge the quality of each submission.
Why you should go to Awwwards for web design inspiration
If you leave the Webbys (which are a bit broader in scope) out of the equation, Awwwards is pretty much the gold standard when it comes to acknowledging the highest-quality web design produced today. And there are a couple of reasons for that.
Expert jury voting
While most inspiration sites are personal or side projects, Awwwards has hand-picked a jury of web experts to weigh in on each submitted site. And they don’t just evaluate a site based on how “pretty” it is: instead, they consider each site’s design, usability, creativity, and content, give each dimension a score, then calculate a total score. They even explain the scoring system.
Breakdowns in detail pages
But the transparency doesn’t stop at sharing their scoring system. They actually display each jury member’s scoring across all four dimensions, right on the site’s detail page — along with the scores of regular community members (which you’re welcome to become by joining).
Extensive tagging
Finally, Awwwards tags each site with a host of terms detailing different elements like frameworks and platforms used, dominant colors, and industry/vertical details.
Editor’s note: My one wish for Awwwards would be that it give content more than 10% of the final overall score. Seems like an injustice to all those hardworking copywriters and content-rich sites out there.
CSSnectar’s inspirational apps are triple-vetted. First, there’s a fee to submit a app for review, and I think it’s safe to assume people won’t pay to submit unless they’re confident in and proud of the work. Second, a team of creatives reviews each submission before it goes live.
Why you should go to CSSNectar for design inspiration
Three words: Triple. Vetted. Content.
While you can find human-curated content and design inspiration all around the web, a three-stage curation process that includes hand-picked experts really brings the cream of the crop to the top.
Detailed filtering options
CSS Nectar makes finding inspiration for specific site types easy with their tags and filters, which include category, feature, country, and color tags.
Abduzeedo offers up stiff doses of design inspiration on the daily — allowing you to keep up with today’s web design trends. And because the staff doesn’t limit itself to web design, you’ll find it helps you stretch your personal design paradigm into new dimensions. After all, there’s nothing to say your next app can’t be inspired by awesome graphic design in a print ad, right?
Why you should go to Abduzeedo for design inspiration
They highlight the full breadth of design disciplines
Abduzeedo isn’t just for digital design inspiration. Instead, they highlight everything from photography to architecture. And as any creative knows, breadth and variety of inspiration can stimulate whole new ways of approaching any problem.
A wide variety of formats
Abduzeedo also brings diversity to their inspiration game via the wide variety of media they work in. Besides their daily showcases, they also bring the creativity through long-form stories, wallpapers, and even (gasp) IRL events.
Run by Daniel Howells of Howells Studio, siteInspire boasts a huge library of inspirational apps you can easily filter with an extensive tagging system. Using multiple tags at once can really refine the type of web inspiration you get, and diverse combinations can produce some interesting results.
Why you should go to siteInspire for web design inspiration
An elegant tagging system helps you dial in the right inspiration.
Subject-based inspiration
As you freelancers and agency designers know well, sometimes you need inspiration for a specific industry or business vertical. Whatever industry you need inspiration for, siteInspire’s subject tags will get you to the right place.
Style-based navigation
Sometimes, you’re less interested in a subject or industry than you are in the overall layout, or even just a specific design pattern.
Unfortunately, when you search for things like “unusual navigation” on other inspiration sites, the results aren’t usually what you’re looking for. Fortunately, siteInspire has filters/tags just for that and they’re great for finding hyper-targeted inspiration.
While many of the best design inspiration sites give you a ton of highly granular tools for finding exactly what you’re looking for, there’s also a deep joy to be found in “accidental” discovery.
Pages provides that experience with a feed-focused design you can view in list or grid format — as well as a straightforward search tool that might speed up the process if you need something specific. But I get the impression that Pages’ designers would rather you dive right into the feed so you can find something a little unexpected. As long as you’re looking for product marketing app inspiration, that is.
Why you should go to Product Pages for web design inspiration
If you’re currently in the early stages of designing a product marketing app, this is the app you’ve been looking for.
Marketing app inspiration
While many other inspirational sites focus on more “razzle-dazzle” pages, Pages is the place to go for the (somewhat more) straightforward art of designing to persuade. The sites enshrined here offer a host of great web design ideas on different ways to present product screenshots, how to tackle the difficult process of writing headlines, and how to build strong navigational systems that don’t distract too much from the holy grail: a conversion.
Inspiration for page optimizations
As designers, we all know how annoying it can be when the marketing person asks for help optimizing a pricing or checkout page. Usually his name is something like Tim and he’s constantly trying to litter brightly colored buttons throughout the site. Luckily, Pages has pricing, checkout, and store page categories with design concepts that help you give that ugly suggestion Tim offered some style.
Land-book markets themselves as having “the finest handpicked app inspirations,” and it’s with good reason. Land-book offers a wide showcase of the best landing pages from various industries. On Land-book you’ll find a wide range of design inspiration, from SaaS landing pages, agency app, portfolios, and all the way to ecommerce stores.
You can even make an account on their app and save a collection of the app designs you like to reference later. Whether you’re looking for retro designs, inspiration for social media, looking to do a redesign, or working on user interfaces, Land-book is a good place to get inspired.
Commerce Cream curates some of the best-looking ecommerce app designs submitted by design agencies. If you’re looking for some ecommerce inspiration, Commerce Cream is a great resource to find a wide variety of design styles — including original, bold, modern, and minimal designs.
Why you should go to Commerce Cream for web design inspiration
Commerce Cream is a great place to find ecommerce design inspiration because they only feature the best-looking online stores out there. They also show you the agencies behind the designs, allowing you to discover impressive portfolios from some of the best web design agencies.
Quality designs only
Apps submitted on Commerce Cream are vetted before they make the app. Anyone can submit a store, but only select stores are picked to be featured. This ensures that all apps displayed are backed by quality design agencies.
Find the agencies behind the designs
Being able to find the design agency behind your favorite app design is like discovering a candy store. It opens the door to discovering even more design inspiration from a particular style you like. This can give you the opportunity to view other portfolio work from the agencies that create your favorite designs.
Depending on how often you look for web design inspiration, you’ve probably come across Dribbble. Dribbble is a community of designers that share, grow their skills, and find design work — all in one marketplace. It’s a great resource for any designer, but specifically good at being a resource for design inspiration.
Why you should go to Dribbble for web design inspiration
Dribbble has a large showcase of designs — everything from print to web design. It’s a great resource for finding inspiration outside of just web design.
Finding inspiration outside of web design
Sometimes the best app design ideas come from you doing something completely new. Try looking for web design inspiration in graphic designs or animations. Dribbble has a diverse variety of designs across multiple fields of work to help get creative. If you’re looking for inspiration for UX design, or even web development, Dribbble is a great place to get inspired.
Sometimes, inspiration doesn’t come from a visual source — and isn’t limited to a specific project. Instead, you might find a motivational story that pushes you to go further with your work and career, so you can design your way into new avenues.
For those moments, The Great Discontent’s interviews can kindle your creative fire. Jump into Q&As with successful designers, art directors, illustrators, and more, and grab some insight into what makes them — and their careers — tick.
Why you should go to The Great Discontent for web design inspiration
Intimate interviews with design industry leaders
Sometimes, the design industry can feel hyper-focused on concrete things like deliverables, workflows, tools, and best practices.
All that’s powerful, and much needed, but it can also lead us to lose sight of the real human beings behind the pixels — and the often-powerful stories that led them to their dream careers. The Great Discontent affords us a rare, personal glimpse behind the screens to explore more nebulous, but ultimately more emotional topics like the links between creativity and vulnerability, the power of stories, and the often-difficult art of saying no.
It’s powerful stuff, and could do more to inspire you than all the eye-candy Dribbble’s could offer.
From its origins as a humble mailing list, A List Apart has grown into a key destination for the design community, becoming a reliable resource for quality articles that rise above the norm.
I mean, how do you not read the journal that published Ethan Marcotte’s “Responsive Web Design”? (Which, in case you’ve been on Mars lately, basically started “the whole responsive design thing.”)
Why you should go to A List Apart for web design inspiration
In-depth written content
If you’re looking for the top 25 WordPress themes of 2020, A List Apart is not for you. But if you’re looking for thoughtful, innovative takes on the finer points of designing for our digital world from the best designers on the web–it’s the best damn design journal on the web.
This is a bit of a hot take, but: in a design world dominated by apps that need, above all, to attract new users and make more money, the raw, middle finger raised to UX that Brutalism represents can be a bit of a breath of fresh air.
You won’t see a lot of refined interactions, lovingly set type, or rigidly harmonious grids on Brutalist Apps. Instead, you’ll see grids broken 16 ways to Sunday, massive headlines set in ye olde “web safe” fonts, bizarre cursor-based effects that seem designed to obliterate rather than navigate a app, and scroll effects that seem designed to assault the senses.
Overall, the sites gathered here offer an intriguing glimpse of what the web can be when creativity needn’t concern itself with conversions. And while brutalism’s certainly not the only way to explore that theme, it is a weirdly compelling one.