5 design lessons from luxury brand websites

Measure first

In design, measuring starts with looking. Open your homepage and your best-selling product page on your phone, and count everything on the first screen that asks for attention: banners, badges, pop-ups, buttons, typefaces, colors. Then do the same on a luxury brand website you admire. The gap between the two counts is what the five lessons below are about.

1. Space: give the product room

Space is how you direct attention without adding anything to the screen. Nielsen Norman Group’s guide to visual hierarchy puts it plainly: an element with more space around it gets more attention. When we looked at The Row’s homepage for this article, the page had no headline and no copy: just one full-width black-and-white photograph under a single line of navigation, and the footer below it.

On your own site:

• Try fewer, larger images in product lists.
• Open up the space between sections and tighten it between a heading and its text. Closeness tells people what belongs together.
• Don’t let space push the essentials down: on a phone, keep the product name, price and buy button on the first screen.

2. Typography: few typefaces, clear order

Good typography gives text an order. Aesop’s homepage uses two typefaces, one for its large headings and one for menus, buttons and text; The Row’s homepage makes do with one.

• Use two typefaces at most, and give each one a single job.
• Limit sizes. Nielsen Norman Group suggests no more than three: for headings, subheadings and body text.
• Don’t trade readability for elegance. Thin, light-gray text looks refined but is hard to read. WCAG, the web’s accessibility guidelines, asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 between normal text and its background.
• Let lines breathe: WCAG’s strictest level suggests no more than 80 characters per line and line spacing of at least 1.5.
• Load only the font weights you use; extra ones can delay your text from appearing (Why is your site slow?).

3. Restraint: what luxury brand websites leave out

Restraint is built from what you leave out: stacked promo banners, countdown timers, pop-ups that appear the moment a page opens. Each looks small on its own; together they stand in front of the product. Google also notes that pop-ups covering the content can make a page harder for search engines to understand, which may hurt its search performance.

• Cut back on color. Nielsen Norman Group suggests 2 primary and 2 secondary colors for uncomplicated designs.
• Give each section one main action. The large image area at the top of Aesop’s homepage holds a short label, one heading, one sentence and one button.
• Restraint isn’t hiding information. Price, shipping and returns should be easy to find; our 9-point product page checklist covers what belongs on the page.

4. Photography: consistent, sharp, true to scale

On a quiet page, the photograph does the talking. On Aesop’s homepage, each product card shows the product on a plain, light background, with its name, a one-line description, size, price and one button below.

• Consistency: the same light, background and framing. Shopify’s product photography guide suggests keeping your camera and tripod in the same position throughout the shoot.
• Detail and scale: close-ups that show texture, and at least one photo that shows the product’s real size: in hand, worn or in use. Baymard Institute also recommends at least one such “in scale” image on every product page.
• Quality doesn’t mean weight: Shopify suggests aiming for product images no larger than 200 KB. Upload them at the size they’re displayed, in WebP or AVIF.

5. Pace: a page that doesn’t rush

Pace is how quickly a page reveals itself: each section carries one idea, there’s breathing room between sections, and motion is slow and sparing. But a slow pace doesn’t mean a slow page.

• One idea per screen: one image, one heading, one action, then the next.
• Keep motion gentle, and let people stop it: WCAG asks for a way to pause anything that starts moving on its own and lasts more than five seconds. The film on Aesop’s homepage plays muted, with a pause button in its corner.
• Respect “reduce motion”: phones and computers have a setting that cuts non-essential motion. For visitors who turn it on, drop the slide and zoom effects (prefers-reduced-motion in CSS).
• Keep the opening image or video light: a full-screen image is the largest element on the first screen, and that’s exactly what Google’s LCP metric (how fast the main content loads) measures. More in Core Web Vitals in plain language.

Where to start

Start by taking things away: removing a banner, a badge or a pop-up costs nothing, and the page gets calmer at once. Everything left should have a reason to be there. Then simplify your typefaces and colors. Photography takes the most work, so plan it as a shoot of its own. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on the same things, our free 48-point inspection also reviews typography, visual hierarchy, photo quality and design consistency, and the report puts the changes in order of priority. And if these lessons lead to a redesign, read how to keep your Google rankings through it.