Design Inspiration: Websites We Admire
Half of this studio’s craft is reading other people’s work. This is the short list we actually study — sites that do one specific job unusually well.
How We Pick
We judge a site the way a buyer would, on a phone first: does it load fast in portrait mode? Is the navigation obvious without being explained? Does the copy say what the page actually is? If a site passes those three checks, it earns a place here — in whatever industry it sells.
The list stays short on purpose. We don’t collect links for the sake of collecting them, and we don’t ask anyone for a link back. We just keep coming back to these.
Sites We’ve Studied Recently
CloneWatches — niche e-commerce, mobile done right
We first came across this replica watches catalog while benchmarking how a small product catalog should behave on a phone. Three things stood out enough to write down.
Navigation does the sorting. When a catalog covers a dozen brands, the menu should carry the whole job. The Rolex super clone watches section is a clean example: one obvious path from brand to model, and the page stays quick from the first byte.
Product photos stay honest. The Patek Philippe section keeps its shots detailed but lightweight — a buyer reading in portrait mode gets the detail without the page slowing to a crawl.
Codrops — front-end experiments
New layout and interaction ideas, demoed live in the browser. We check it whenever a client brief is vague and we need a shared picture of “good.”
Smashing Magazine — practical web development
Long, careful articles on performance, accessibility and standards. The kind of reading we pass around the office between client calls.
Awwwards — the best-built sites on the web
A wall of site design that earns its awards. When a project needs a visual north star, this is where we go first.
About the links on this page
These are not paid placements and not a link exchange. If a site stops being worth studying, it comes off the list. That is the entire policy, and it has not changed since 1998.