Best Website Designs of 2010

What I wouldn't give to watch YouTube videos of some of these designers putting these sites together. Everything from how they get the background textures, to adding gradients, shadows, altering colors, everything. It would be amazing.<p>I'd probably pay to watch a 10 part series from an accomplished designer who goes start to finish designing some of these nice sites.

As a disinterested observer, I can say two things:<p>1) They're pretty<p>2) They piss me off<p>These sites scream style over substance. I can't think of an Alexa top 500 site that uses this kind of design. The only one I frequent would be Grooveshark, and their design is highly functional.<p>Between facebook, gmail, reddit, HN, and the various blogs and news sites I visit, 98% of my time online is spent on sites that look nothing like these. Even Hipmunk, while very web 2.0, is completely function-focused. These sites seem like they're pretty for the sake of being pretty, and I couldn't for the life of me say what a single one of them actually does.

These are 'pretty designs', some even just a one page, above the fold bit.<p>More impressive would be comprehensive site design and UX for a site with a significant amount content, and not just a pretty home page.

Have there been any good looking regular websites released this year? A lot of best of lists tend to just be a list of portfolio and design studio websites.

Are there lists like this of great design examples, except focused on web apps? These lists always let me down since they seem to bias static information sites over web applications, which is what I'm interested in. These are great designs, but mostly unhelpful to me because of this.

Except maybe for "ben the bodyguard", these websites are pretty much all "design" and no "web". In fact, most of these look like they were made straight out of Illustrator (a couple of those websites are actually huge images stitched together with <i>no text</i>!).

I prefer the Drawar best of roundups because at least they provide a few paragraphs of explanation for each screenshot explaining what makes it exceptional: <a href="http://www.drawar.com/posts/2010-best-designs-2nd-quarter" rel="nofollow">http://www.drawar.com/posts/2010-best-designs-2nd-quarter</a>

Not a single one makes use of the full width of the screen. All static layout. My websites all make use of the full screen width. I still think dynamic layout is better for usability. What do you think?

Is there a way to just filter all posts containing '2010' in the title?

They kinda all look the same to me. Pretty, but unmemorable.

"Showcasing 65 of the Best Website Designs of 2010"<p>I pretty much stopped reading and closed the tab after that. Seriously, <i>65</i>?

We need a save option, elsewise I have to make a worthless comment just to flag the story!

jQuery appears to be the staple of modern web development/design. With javascript turned off, quite a few of these sites still remain pretty and usable.