Web Design Trends Seen in 25 Luxury Brands

I’m currently working on a design project for a client that’s looking to have a high end feel to their web design. With that, I’ve been researching web design trends on the sites of luxury brands. Join me on my explorations and check out where web design’s at for the top automobile, jewelry, fashion, and lifestyle brands around.

If you’re looking to align yourself with a feeling of being expensive and worth every penny, consider adopting some of these web design trends in your own site.

We can help you with your luxury web design project – click here to contact us.

Web Design Trend – Lots of Clean White Space

Bentley Motorcars - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

One of the most common threads I’ve found in high end brands is lots of white space. That’s not just a web design trend for luxury brands – it’s something I’ve been seeing a movement towards across the board, particularly with blog layouts.

It’s almost like everyone’s gotten tired of tons and tons of visual elements, and their eyes just want a break.

Chanel - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

There’s still a place for photography and slideshows in site designs with lots of open space.

Christian Dior - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

You’ll notice really classic font choices in typography and logo design in high end brands as well.

These brands have usually been around for years, and their design elements have been made classic enough to stand the test of time.

Ralph Lauren - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

One great thing about lots of white space? Your hits of pop colors pack that much more visual punch when they don’t have to compete with anything else in the design.

Rolls Royce Motorcars - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

And guys – even Rolls Royce uses basic WordPress theme layouts. (They could’ve made this site look just a tad more elegant feeling by changing that light grey background to white… but that’s just me.)

Large Blocks of Photography

Armani - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

You can thank Pinterest for the photo heavy web design trend. The photo saving social network has gotten so popular, that tons of brands have been adopting layouts that focus more on imagery and less on text.

Burberry - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

I think a challenge in a layout like this is working in a navigation that’s intuitive, easy to use, and above all easy to find.

If it gets lost in the design, your site visitors won’t spend time looking for where to click – they’ll just click away to another site.

Louis Vuitton - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

The Louis Vuitton site marrys the huge images with lots of white space beautifully – it’s one of my favorite examples here.

Versace - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

Conversely, I’m less enthusiastic about the Versace site design. There’s just so many visual elements competing for the shopper’s attention.

Fashion is all about being on the cutting edge, but I’m curious as to how well this site is encouraging sales.

Ferragamo - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

Don’t be afraid to go dark with the elements around the photos if you’re working with images that are a tad on the dark side.

Z Gallerie - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

No nonsense blocks translate easily to a tablet or smartphone – this layout would be easy to execute for the smaller business with a less extensive web design budget.

Unconventional Design Elements

Betsey Johnson - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

I love Betsey Johnson’s brand because it’s always fun, unconventional, and irreverent. Her site design follows that feel as well. Some big blocks of photos, some hand done elements… It doesn’t feel like it follows any hard fast stodgey rules, and I like that.

Hermes - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

But then I feel like the Hermes site is way too far out in left field. As a first time site visitor, I was confused. And I clicked away pretty quickly.

Don’t be afraid to get experimental, but make sure you’re remembering your customer – your site is for them, not you. If they can’t get around, they’ll go to another site faster than you can say “what the heck is going on with this site?”

Classic Layouts

Boss - Hugo Boss - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

We need to remember in designing for the web that certain layouts work. They’ve always worked, they still work, they’ll work tomorrow.

They just look good and get the job done.

That’s not a bad thing.

Lancome - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

I love this example of a classic website layout with a background image. While it looks very classic grid oriented, it still feels fresh and now, not dated. I think the photography used and the background element really help that.

Jaguar - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

Logo. Nav Bar. Content.

It works.

Rolex - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

Just because large blocks of color with nav bars and logos front and center have been done for a bajillion years, it doesn’t mean we need to reinvent the wheel.

Rolex’s site feels like it’s been around forever, just like the brand, but at the same time it doesn’t feel stuffy and old. It feels refined.

Tiffany and Co - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

I absolutely love the use of typography on the Tiffany web site. Different font sizes and styles that are all part of the same family add visual interest.

And you’ll note most of these brands, as I’ve said before, are using really classic feeling fonts. Simple typefaces that suggest longevity, not fads that fade with time.

Dark Color Scheme

Cartier - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

Ello, that brand new social media site everyone was drooling over recently, brought the dark background with white text design to the open and slapped everyone in the face with it.

Cartier does it much, much more elegantly.

Oversized Photographs

Fendi - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

I think there’s a place for this type of web design, with large photographs taking up huge amounts of real estate, but again. Keep your end user in mind. Make sure text is easy to read, and that navigation is easy to find.

Prada - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

Again… if your site user can’t read your content easily… what’s your content even there for?

Slideshows

Gucci - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

Every now and then I get someone asking me if slideshows still have a place in web design, or if that design trend is totally over.

I still think they’re relevant, and done well they can be and attention-getter. I use one on my own home page.

Pottery Barn - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

The Pottery Barn slider feels more fresh and now by taking up the entire width of the page, instead of a little chunk of real estate in the middle of the screen.

Williams-Sonoma - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

Williams-Sonoma brings the slideshow back into more standard boundaries, but really wins the slideshow game with literally mouthwatering photography.

West Elm - Luxury Brand Web Design Trends - Hearts and Laserbeams

One of the reasons I included the Pottery Barn / Williams-Sonoma / West Elm sites is the fact that they’re all different entities, with different web layouts, but they still all sit well together as a family of brands. High fives, guys.

Overall Web Design Trends

Now that you’ve seen the web design trends being rocked by high end luxury brands, there’s a few things to keep in mind that I saw repeatedly in my design research.

Clean Type Driven Logo Design – If your brand is trying to convey a feeling of classic elegance, timelessness, and luxury, skip the cutesy or trendy fonts. Ditch anything cartoony in an icon design. The overall trend in luxury brand logo design is low key fonts that look dependable, like they’ve been around forever. Whether you choose a serif or sans serif font, it should be one that your customer can read easily, one that doesn’t feel like a fad.

Parallax Scrolling – Parallax scrolling is a web design buzzword these days, and I can take it or leave it. Sometimes it looks great, sometimes it’s annoying. (You’ll know parallax scrolling by a very long scrolly home page, and sometimes it looks like fancy animation effects happen as the page scrolls.) This is one web design trend that isn’t necessarily something I see being a long term classic design layout 10 years from now. For now it’s cool I guess. I’m not really a fan.

Mobile Responsive Web Design – A plugin that creates a mobile version of your site is fine. A mobile responsive website that automatically resizes depending on the screen it’s viewing on is better. Whether your customer is looking at your website on a desktop computer, tablet, or smartphone, you want your content to look its best. If your site isn’t mobile responsive, it needs to be.

No matter what your luxury web design needs are, we can help you – click here to contact us for your completely free web design consultation. We’ll go over your goals for your website, your goals for your business, who your customer is, and even who you’re competing against to create a site design that’s perfect for you.

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Freelance Illustrator Steph Calvert • Steph Calvert Art | https://stephcalvertart.com

Freelance illustrator Steph Calvert is an award-winning artist with 24 years of experience working as a creative professional. She is based in McDonough, Georgia, just south of Atlanta.

Steph Calvert has expertise as a children’s book illustrator. She is an expert surface pattern designer for art licensing and creates line drawings for publishing and product design. Steph has years of additional expertise as a mural artist, creating original art, and logo design for small businesses. She is currently querying literary agents with her first author/illustrator book projects.

National SCBWI Conference, 2023
Illustration Summer Camp – The Highlights Foundation, 2021
Make Art That Sells, 2017
BFA in Computer Art – SCAD, 1999


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