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Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

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There are an extensive amount of roads you can take in web design, specifically in navigation. Here, we will talk about one specific navigation technique, tab-based navigation. If properly carried out, tabbed navigation can be very clean and organized within a web layout.

So what is tabbed navigation? Well, it is essentially a set of buttons most often set horizontally. Tabs generally follow numerous different styling guidelines. First, a tab set usually is attached to or slightly protrudes from a container, like in the example below. Also, notice how the open tab matches the background color of the container, and the other buttons are darker. This is another common styling guideline.

Iceberg in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

When you look at tabbed navigations, you will also notice many styling trends. First, many tabs will have rounded corners on buttons. This helps to create a clean look. Also helping to make a clean look is the use of separation between buttons. Most designs use space to separate buttons, but a bevel, single line, or background color contrast will also look nicely.

You will also see the use of hover effects, which is a common usability characteristic of the tabbed navigation. Gradients, radial and linear, help to achieve an impressve hover effect that brings dimension to the button that the user is selecting. Actually, you will notice that many tab buttons, selected or not, will use a slight gradient to add depth and demension to the button. This is a very simple detail often used to bring extra styling to many different user interface elements, such as buttons. The most important aspect in the design of tabbed navigation is that the active tab needs to be clear and obvious. This is what separates a tabbed navigation from an ordinary horizontal row of buttons or hyperlinks (thanks, Allen).

So, with all of that in mind, take a look at these 50 excellent tabbed-navigations shown below. Look for the trends, and follow the link to further inspect the usability of the tabbed navigation and how it looks with the rest of the design.

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

Good Tab Based Navigation

ExpressionEngine
This tab set is beautifully styled. It uses a bevel to seperate tabs, large buttons, and clean typography with icons.

Expressionengine in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Astratos
Another tab navigation that is clean because of rounded corners and use of a gradient to style.

Astratos in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

WorldCat
Rounded corners and clean separation.

Worldcat in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Veer
These tabs have beautiful styling. Notice the use of different colors and a drop shadow for separation purposes.

Veer in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

365 Days of Astronomy
Use of different colors and a drop shadow to separate the tabs not in use.

365days in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Wire & Twine
This is some excellent texture use with a clean layout.

Wiretwine in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Komodo
A good example of tabs used in a module.

Komodo in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Inkd
Good styling and usable because of size and separation.

Inkd in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Jepco Storage
This button set uses dark colors to fade out the tabs not in use, and a great border on the buttons.

Jepco in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Kinder-Aktuell
Good gradient use and separation.

Kinder in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

FidesVita
Tabs used with a sub navigation.

Fidesvita in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Apple Movie Trailers
Excellent styling and a strong example of a vertical tab layout.

Movietrailers in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

PBwiki
Simple yet clean tabs.

Pbwiki in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Fancast
Another vertical tab set up, this time used in a slider instead of content navigation.

Fancast in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

College Park Church
Nicely styled tabs with good colors and a sub navigation.

Collegepark in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

One Button Mouse
Excellently designed buttons in a simple tab layout with good icons as a visual support.

Onebutton in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Mint
Tabs used in a very content heavy module

Mint in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

District Solutions
Vertical tabs are used very rarely. But they can look good!

Vert in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

23andMe
Good coloring and use of a border to differentiate the tabs from the body background.

23andme in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Tumblon
Very clean tabs with a border.

Tumblon in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

STUDIO7DESIGNS
This tab styling uses a gradient for a cool fading appearance, and a sub navigation is included.

Studio7 in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

WWD
A simple yet usable tab system with a sub navigation.

Wwd in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Ministry of Sound
On this tab system, a gradient is used to add depth to the selected button.

Ministry in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Disambiguity
Use of rounded corners and a strong color difference to separate the tabs not in use.

Disambiguity in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Fontcase
A clean tab layout in a very nice design.

Fontcase in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Mixx
This tab system uses a different size, color, and styling to bring out the button selected.

Mixx in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Concentric Studio
A very simple and usable tab navigation.

Concentric in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Domestika
A vertical tab layout with coloring.

Domestika in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

crowdSPRING
A simple tab system. This one uses a large size as well as a different color to make the selected button pop.

Crowdspring in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Ready Made
A well-styled tabbed navigation.

Readymade in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

The Mindset Game
Another very simple and easy tab navigation that works perfectly.

Themindset in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

nclud
A little bit different tab setup that only styles the selected button.

Nclud in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

The Invoice Machine
The navigation below uses a strong color difference, usable buttons, and borders to separate tabs from the rest of the design.

Invoicemachine in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

FreeAgent
A good example of the background of the container flowing with the button.

Freeagent in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Web Notes
This is very organized, and it appears to tab down instead of up like most.

Webnotes in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Magpie
Doesn’t get much more simple than this, but still a good example.

Magpie in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Two December
Nice styling that works perfectly with the rest of the layout.

Twodecember in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Lanbruck’s
Another very beautiful tab layout, notice the slight hover effect that can be seen on the second tab over.

Lanbrucks in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

LittleLines
This is one of the better examples of styling in this showcase because of the gradients to add dimension to the buttons and strong borders.

Littlelines in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Thuiven
A very nice color harmony and contrast between the selected tab and the others.

Thuiven in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Headscape
Another button that uses a gradient to fade out, creating an awesome appearance.

Headscape in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Space Collective
Very simple but functional at the same time.

Spacecollective in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Jobs on the Wall
More brilliant styling, these tabs fit perfectly with the other elements on the site.

Jobsonthewall in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Designsensory
Very basic styling with strong colors and a sub navigation.

Designsensory in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Ad Fed
Here is another smooth and visually appealing tab navigation set.

Adfed in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

OS Communications
Basic color-based styles with a pointer to show the selected tab.

Os in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Hoefler and Frere – Jones
Use of slanted sides instead of rounded corners makes this tab-based navigation interesting and unique.

Hoefler in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Track My People
These buttons use gradients for depth, and a drop shodow to add demension to the tabs behind the selected one.

Trackmypeople in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Revolution Drviving
Brilliant button backgrounds that aren’t over the top make these tabs really great.

Revolution in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

City of Grace
A good example of tabs that work nice colors into a usable layout.

Cityofgrace in Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation

Related Posts

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

Matt Cronin is an avid graphic designer, web designer/developer, Cocoa programmer, photographer, digital artist, and the like. He also enjoys writing, and does quite a bit of writing for Smashing Magazine. He is currently working on a startup called VAEOU, which will have new services coming soon.

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  1. 1
    Quan Vu
    April 6th, 2009 3:38 pm

    very nice!

  2. 2
    Brian Temecula
    April 6th, 2009 3:40 pm

    Nice tabs, but my favorite tabs are like the ones on this template:

    http://www.openwebdesign.org/viewdesign.phtml?id=3856

  3. 3
    Immelmann
    April 6th, 2009 3:49 pm

    Know what I really wish SM would do? I’d love to see BAD examples of some of these things, to illustrate what NOT to do, and compare them to the good examples.

  4. 4
    Russell Heimlich
    April 6th, 2009 4:13 pm

    where were the bad tab based navigation examples?

  5. 5
    anon
    April 6th, 2009 4:39 pm

    “The extensive amount of roads you can take in web design, specifically in navigation.” … what the?.. did anyone proof read this copy.. half of it doesn’t make sense.

  6. 6
    Ignus
    April 6th, 2009 5:16 pm

    Guys, refer to the name of the article: “Showcase Of Well-Designed Tabbed Navigation” found in the “Showcases” section. The article would have been in the “How To” section of the website were it going to display badly designed tabs to boot. I found the article pretty cool, gives alot of ideas of how to do tabs. I have noticed SM becoming increasingly aggressive the past few articles (Tho sometimes very very justified)

  7. 7
    Zeol
    April 6th, 2009 5:22 pm

    The linked sites are helpful, but the text of this article is atrocious. The first sentence doesn’t even have a verb, and the first paragraph has several grammatical errors. Has no one edited this article? The author certainly didn’t.

  8. 8
    Matt Cronin
    April 6th, 2009 5:41 pm

    Hi all,

    Sorry about the error in the first sentence. I have contacted the editor and it will be fixed shortly.

    Enjoy the post!

  9. 9
    Gerson
    April 6th, 2009 5:56 pm

    Nice showcase !!

    find more treasure for us :)

    ——-HUKYHOME.COM

  10. 10
    linhland
    April 6th, 2009 6:46 pm

    thanks sm for your usefull topic :)

  11. 11
    youse
    April 6th, 2009 7:40 pm

    Really great selection.

  12. 12
    SleepyCod
    April 6th, 2009 8:40 pm

    Pretty good article,

    But I feel I always see the same websites over and over again. Kind of tired to see the mac style ruling on every post. Let’s have some breathe of fresh air on SM!

  13. 13
    Paradox
    April 6th, 2009 9:54 pm

    Umm, why is Disambiguity listed up there? All it uses is a Woothemes wordpress theme, with very little modification.

  14. 14
    Creamy CSS Showcase
    April 6th, 2009 10:30 pm

    Special thanks for really big and inspirational list of good practice of tabbed navigation,.. a lot of good works to see.

    Helpful and interesting post! ;)

  15. 15
    m_dzo
    April 6th, 2009 11:18 pm

    one word: wow!

  16. 16
    Tsayonara
    April 6th, 2009 11:23 pm

    Thank you, a good post as usual.

    You needn’t have posted so many! It would be better to show 5 really good ones, 5 usual ones and 5 bad ones.

  17. 17
    Karl Ransaier
    April 6th, 2009 11:25 pm

    GREAT Inspiration. Here is a nother amazing Tab: http://www.cocktalis.de/ueber-18/produkte/
    Just klick in the Link and confirm the age selector and look on the top of the page. On Mouse over and click you will see the amazing Tabeffect.

  18. 18
    Marcel
    April 6th, 2009 11:55 pm

    as usual a nice list!
    thanks

  19. 19
    Allen
    April 7th, 2009 12:10 am

    You don’t say that the active tab needs to be clear and obvious. This is what seperates a tabbed navigation from an ordinary horizonal row of buttons/hyperlinks.

  20. 20
    Liam Potter
    April 7th, 2009 12:28 am

    Some of these are not really tabs.

  21. 21
    gr8pixel
    April 7th, 2009 12:47 am

    awesome.. love the way they have design the depth, look & feel!!

  22. 22
    Robert Heine
    April 7th, 2009 1:12 am

    Perhaps you could add this example too:
    http://brainjoys.de/ueber_brainjoys

    The Tabcontainer there is something, i’ve never seen on any website before.

  23. 23
    naved
    April 7th, 2009 1:18 am

    good tabation :P

  24. 24
    lossendae
    April 7th, 2009 1:39 am

    disambiguity use a woothemes free theme for Wordpress!

  25. 25
    dottom
    April 7th, 2009 1:50 am

    this is my fav! – definitely deserves to bi in the competition
    Orvas hotels

  26. 26
    solexy
    April 7th, 2009 2:52 am

    really great

  27. 27
    azizbaba
    April 7th, 2009 3:00 am

    very nice and useful article,

    I appreciate.

  28. 28
    DJ
    April 7th, 2009 3:04 am

    Very nice! Sorry to see you missed out on BaseNet.
    How about a post on how to create nice tabs and what ajax library to use?!

  29. 29
    Tom Bradshaw
    April 7th, 2009 4:01 am

    Some interesting takes on the idea, I often use tabbed navigation – it’s a great way to navigate a site.

  30. 30
    Anon
    April 7th, 2009 4:19 am

    What’s incredibly important to me as a designer/UI developer is being aware of the code used to make a certain effect possible. Saying “this design has a nice gradient” means absolutely NOTHING unless I know how it’s done. At some point you have to make a decision about whether the graphic effect warrants the extra messing about in development.

    I would be VERY interested to see which of these tabbed navigations used semantic markup. Which ones use Libraries like jquery? Which ones use pure CSS (or sliding doors) Which ones degrade nicely on none-javascript browsers? what advantages are there in using one technique over another?

    Maybe that’s too in depth for a post called “showcase”… Maybe just farming a bunch of screenshots and hyperlinks is just a thing that design blogs do for hits?

  31. 31
    Maniquí
    April 7th, 2009 6:02 am

    To complement this article, I recommend you this Alert Box by Jakob Nielsen: Tabs, Used Right.

    Many of the examples listed on SM article break the guidelines proposed by Nielse, although he may go two far on his guidelines, sometimes.

  32. 32
    Sparks
    April 7th, 2009 6:58 am

    I don’t see coda on this list. http://www.panic.com/coda

  33. 33
    Nytryk
    April 7th, 2009 7:23 am

    I have an unique one, just checkout at, http://www.xelerate.co.cc/

  34. 34
    Artem
    April 7th, 2009 9:47 am

    Some nice examples. But it’s hard to get tabs wrong in my opinion

  35. 35
    Chris Robinson
    April 7th, 2009 10:26 am

    some nice examples

  36. 36
    Shane
    April 7th, 2009 10:58 am

    I love the vertical tabs like on District Solutions. Anyone know of a tutorial for adding them on a one column WP theme?

  37. 37
    Navdeep
    April 7th, 2009 11:30 am

    Some of them are really good.

  38. 38
    imsraaia
    April 7th, 2009 12:27 pm

    Awesome… resource…

  39. 39
    olf
    April 7th, 2009 2:48 pm

    Perhaps you could add this example too:

    http://www.anlieger.net

  40. 40
    BGdesign
    April 7th, 2009 8:23 pm

    Really liked Jepco Storage thanks for the visuals. Big fan of Quality control.

  41. 41
    BGdesign
    April 7th, 2009 8:28 pm

    STUDIO7DESIGNS looks really good too. Sweet post.

    B…G..design

  42. 42
    Jamie Stephens
    April 7th, 2009 9:40 pm

    Nice collection. Tabs are one the hardest things to make unique while keeping usable. I appreciate the examples.

  43. 43
    amir
    April 7th, 2009 10:47 pm

    Check out tabs here too…. Teksource.ca

  44. 44
    Marianna
    April 8th, 2009 1:24 am

    Nice article. I recently wrote a blog article about navigation menus and I have included some good examples of mega drop down menus which is the latest trend used by my many sites:
    Navigation menus

  45. 45
    Nusha
    April 8th, 2009 3:20 am

    Like this article!

  46. 46
    sama creation
    April 8th, 2009 3:36 am

    Nice subject !!!
    Tabs are one the hardest things to make unique while keeping usable
    Link [www.samacreation.com]

  47. 47
    Simon Day
    April 8th, 2009 4:18 am

    Nice article.

    Revolution Drviving is a prime example of “Just because I can doesn’t mean I should”. What on earth does a load of cardboard have in common with a driving lesson? Is the car in such a state of disrepair it is being held on with glue and sticky back plastic?

    Grunge has a place and driving lessons is most certainly not it!

  48. 48
    Sjeikeltarek
    April 8th, 2009 6:22 am

    A fine collection, but next time find some bad examples to! To let your visitors see how they shouldn’t do it…

    keep on the good work!

  49. 49
    David Hamill
    April 8th, 2009 8:38 am

    By well designed, I take it you mean ‘nice’. Some of these example are highly likely to be overlooked by people visiting the respective sites.

  50. 50
    Ian Knott
    April 8th, 2009 1:25 pm

    e

  51. 51
    Aaron Smith
    April 8th, 2009 1:34 pm

    I submit the following for consideration…
    http://www.manmademusic.com/

  52. 52
    Raj Kumar Maharjan
    April 9th, 2009 9:30 pm

    NIce Tab menu collection. Impressive way to show out the tab layout

  53. 53
    Braddy
    April 12th, 2009 3:26 am

    OPTIsend Print has also a nice tabbed menu.

    You should check it out

  54. 54
    restu
    April 13th, 2009 8:07 pm

    really good influences for me

  55. 55
    Rainer
    April 15th, 2009 4:27 am

    Hi! Thanks for the nice article.

    Just one more question about tabs: What if I have to or want to show more sections on my tab navigation than the page’s width allows for? Does anyone know a good pattern for this?

    I know some solutions for this, but am not sure which is really good:
    - showing several rows of tabs (like the old amazon)… which looks really ugly
    - showing arrows to move the tabs (like for the spreadsheet-tabs in Excel or for the browser tabs in Firefox)
    - showing only as many tabs as fit in the row and offer further tabs in something like a dropdown menu

    What do you think about this? Any other ideas, recommendations or tips for good examples?

  56. 56
    Abhijeet Chavan
    April 16th, 2009 4:36 am

    Amazing collection, very good inspiration spot :)

  57. 57
    johnny cage
    May 4th, 2009 8:01 pm

    Nice, but how could you possibly even acknowledge the existence of a digital whorehouse like crowdspring. Sites like this should be burned to the ground.

  58. 58
    RJZotti
    June 1st, 2009 5:28 pm

    I liked this article. Although it would have been nice to have a list of the bad examples.

    Do the authors on SM get paid to write these things? If not they need be given a lot more credit. Think about how long it must take to exhaustively search the web for examples. Think of all the boring/useless examples that the author probably stumbled across that he chose NOT to use. Probably a lot.

    Finding different websites, arranging the graphics, thinking of meaningful things to say. That must be a lot of work, putting all this together… that must really suck

  59. 59
    C. Hall
    June 1st, 2009 11:08 pm

    @johnny cage (#57) – Web Notes (listed above) whole website was designed spec, over at 99d. Their user # 248466, if you want to check it for yourself.

  60. 60
    Joel Vardy
    June 15th, 2009 9:28 am

    Very nice collection you have compiled. This post has shown me tabs arn’t limited to minimal websites with a ‘clean’ look.
    After looking through this post I am inspired to try and code some similar examples, purely as a technical exercise.

  61. 61
    Carl - Web Courses Bangkok
    September 29th, 2009 1:17 am

    This post was really useful for a project I am working on . Just sent a lot of the examples over to the designer. Thanks again!

  62. 62
    kranti
    October 8th, 2009 8:25 pm

    Very nice …very useful for new designers….thanks :)

  1. 00

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