Over the last few years, we’ve covered quite a few websites that push web design to a whole other level. 2013 has had some amazing stuff done on the web. Even something as simple as a gift guide can be displayed to the reader in such an amazing way. The sites below truly showcase what the web is capable of in terms of elegance, beauty and an eye for stunning design.
The Verge
Love them or hate them, The Verge is definitely one of the better looking technology sites on the internet today. Their own homepage looks absolutely gorgeous on Retina displays and every now and then, they post an amazing feature that looks like nothing else on their site. They posted their 2013 holiday gift guide last month and did a fantastic job with it. Even the Back To School 2013 has some great product photography with an excellent layout.
Polygon
Polygon, also part of Vox Media like The Verge, brings some fantastic design to gaming online. Most recently, their pages for the PS4 and Xbox One reviews were really stellar. Colour coded pages depending on the console and even the console wireframe animation when it loads is commendable. They also do features like this one on Year Walk by Simogo. Polygon has had great design right from the start and we commend them for it. Their reviews are great examples of how to design long scrolling pages.
The Good Man
The Good Man was the first showcase of 2013 here on Beautiful Pixels. A final year project by Pedro Ivo Hudson, The Good Man is a stellar example of intricate CSS3 craftsmanship and is a prime example of what modern browsers are capable of today. Pedro explains that 'The Good Man' is a "visual transcription of a narrative" and uses only HTML, CSS3 & Web font elements to bring it to life, right in your web browser. If you haven't already, check it out here.
Noisli
Noisli is a fantastic website that we discovered back in October. It offers a minimal & gorgeous way to just switch on background sounds so that you can relax and get to doing what you're supposed to be doing. It offers different kinds of background audios along with auto changing background color of the website. Since the time we wrote about it, Noisli has also added a minimal text editor so that you can also do your typing right on the website. Noisli is a lovely package, all possible within your browser window. You can check it out here.
Exposure
Exposure is brilliant new way to create stunning photo narratives. A new project by Elepath (Creators of the Thinglist app), Exposure lets you quickly and easily drag & drop your photos into the browser window, arrange them along with your choice of headers & text and publish them for your friends & followers. Your narratives are published as Stories on your profile and there's already a growing collection of some fabulous stories being presented via Exposure. Signing up on Exposure is Free and you can publish 3 stories. A subscription costs $9/m or $99/year and is well worth it. Here's an example of a story published by Preshit.
Square
Square is already known for creating great products and their iOS apps have some of the best interaction experiences we've come across. Square also takes the same amount of effort in crafting their gorgeous websites. No matter how big or small the product type, the pages are just as delicious with animations & typography looking absolutely fantastic. Spend two minutes on their website here and you'll know what we're talking about.
Pitchfork
Pitchfork, the independent music critique website, has been known for its design apart from actual content for a long time. They even launched an amazing iOS app called Pitchfork Weekly recently. Their cover story on Daft Punk is the best thing we have seen on the internet for a long time and when everyone was on the hype train for Random Access Memories, this was timed perfectly. Their home page has a really lovely YEAR IN MUSIC feature with great mouse over animations.
Cleartrip Waytogo
Cleartrip does some really great things on mobile. They also blew us away with their page for Cleartrip Waytogo. It lets you input almost any two places and it calculates your complete transport route with approximate cost including local transport in both places and lets you book flights from here. The images used are great and it looks really nice.