26 Creative Approaches to Footer Design

GrandmasterB — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 11:00:24 +0000

In my day-to-day routine, I spend a great deal of time looking for and searching out new trends in Web Design. Lately, I have noticed on trend that is “Swiffering” the Internet…creatively designed footers. Over the past year or so, it has become apparent that the footer of a website is no longer an afterthought or a throw away item. If you follow conventional design principals, you put everything that is deemed ‘unimportant’ at the bottom of the page. If you look at most websites, you’ll notice that many of them have extremely boring footer designs. Most of them you can’t even call “designs”; they’re just static information that they needed to put somewhere…look at my footer. Guilty as charged!

So why buck the system and spice up your footer design? Well, many designer are looking to the footer of the website as valuable real estate to put information that’s not quite top content, but definitely “important”. I have noticed that this trend of creative footer design is especially prominent in the blogging community. With all of the tools available to bloggers from social networking and bookmarking you often struggle to find places to make everything fit and make it look good. Many bloggers are using the footer to place elements like their Twitter updates, FLIKR photos, blog archives, recent comments, latest posts and other elements that are generally left for the sidebar.

I’ve been working on a project for a client that will incorporate a more creative footer design, and eventually when I have time to design version two of GrandmasterB.com; I will be concentrating a lot more time on a creative footer design for the site. I have compiled a list of 26 website designs with stunning and creative footer designs to show you what you can do with your footer. In looking at these sites and their designs, they bring a sense of completion to the site. The entire layout ties the design together and makes for a creative and killer site design. Each of these designs have a unique and creative approach to utilizing the footer as a place to showcase a number of items. Check them out, comment and let me know what you think.