8 beautifully designed Christmas websites

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – especially for web designers.

As the festive season creeps nearer, creatives are approached with all sorts of briefs for both making existing sites more festive and for developing new seasonal online experiences for clients.

If you want to do more for your clients than merely give their websites a falling snow effect or a new red and green colour scheme, the below sites should give you a little inspiration.

Here are eight incredible examples of web design and development, all dedicated to Christmas.

1. Weird Christmas

The Weird Christmas website was created by Brooklyn-based digital design agency Rogue Studio as part of a branding and design skills showcase project.

The site allowed visitors to browse a selection of bizarre vintage Christmas card designs and send one digitally to a friend.

The site was a roaring success. No traditional marketing efforts were put behind it, yet it received 33,000 unique visitors in the first day alone.

Rogue Studio said: “We wanted to create a website that got people in the holiday spirit that played off traditions that everyone knew but twisted in a way that was fun.

“This proved our theory that if we made something that was fun, sharable and limited, people would want to engage and interact.”

The site itself harnesses full screen flat design, micro interaction effects and – of course – Christmas music effects.

2. Ugly Christmas Sweater

The Ugly Christmas Sweater website allows visitors to tailor make a gif that looks like the front of a Christmas jumper.

Visitors can choose the pattern on the jumper (there are both naughty and nice designs), and they can tweak the colours and type a message onto the front of the sweater, too.

They can then download their gif to share anywhere.

The site was created by CocoBongo, a Bareclona-based design, animation and interactive media company, to showcase their skills.

3. 1,2,3 Noel

The luxury French department store Galeries Lafayette set up this fun and colourful microsite just to get visitors to enter a prize draw to win a £1,000 shopping spree.

Before they could enter the prize draw, visitors had to hunt for six illustrated characters on the site.

The site’s designers used Anime.js, Three.js and Vue.js as part of their design process.

4. It’s A Shape Christmas

This website was made by Manchester-based web design agency Made by Shape as part of a ‘doing what we love’ project.

Since 2011, the agency has been creating a digital Christmas advent calendar full of free downloadable Christmas illustrations.

The illustrations are provided by creatives across the country. As their brief, the artists are simply given a triangle, square, circle or hexagon to work with as inspiration.

5. Secrétariat du Père Noël

This heart warming site was designed by Paris-based digital production house Merci Michel. The company specialises in creating cutting edge interactive digital solutions and immersive campaigns and this website was developed as a showcase of their skills.

Visitors can use the site to write a letter to Santa. However, they can also take part in a series of activities on the website before they write their letter.

The site features full screen design and it includes animations, micro interaction effects and parallax scrolling.

6. Gucci Conga Master

The fashion brand Gucci commissioned the creative production company Aquest to develop this site for them in December 2020.

Inspired by a classic arcade game, the website gives visitors an avatar – a solo guest at an 80s Christmas party.

The visitor then has to explore the party room and collect other characters to form a conga line.

The longer the conga line grows, the more levels of the game the user can unlock.

7. Christmas Headquarters

The Christmas Headquarters website belongs to USA-based brand studio and digital publishing company Wasai.

It’s filled with all sorts of resources for celebrating the holidays, from recipes and games to carols, poems and free Christmas graphics and illustrations.

The company’s portfolio of work also includes Mythopedia – a website for reading up on ancient myths – and Quoterati – a site filled with quotes.

8. Steer The Deer

Steer the Deer is an online game that was designed to showcase the skills of Hello Monday, a USA-based company that specialises in developing digital experiences and brand identities.

The game is set in outer space because ‘the world has become to warm for Santa and his reindeer so they have moved to Pluto’.

Unfortunately, Santa’s gifts have spilled out of his sacks on the way to earth. The game revolves around steering two of Santa’s reindeer to pick up the gifts and dodge obstacles like asteroids.

If visitors turn their web cams on, they can steer the deer using the movements of their body rather than the arrow keys on their computer.

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