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In the right hands, the bottom of a web page can be a work of art.
[Illustration: Daniel Salo for Fast Company]
BY Hunter Schwarz2 minute read
Web page footers have never really been given their due. On an earlier internet, the bottom sections of websites were littered with contact information and “under construction” gifs promising site updates that never came, and thanks to infinite scroll, getting to the bottom of some web pages today has never been more difficult.
A good web footer, though, can be the final detail to elevate a site. It’s the last thing some visitors might see before closing the tab, and a web designer’s final chance to leave a good impression. The designers behind Footer, a new, curated database of footers from around the web, are hoping to draw attention to the best.
The idea started after designer Benten Woodring assumed something like it already existed online. It didn’t, so he developed the concept with designer Devin Fountain and Matt Cram, a Shawnee State University graphic design professor. Designer Fons Mans helped create the logo.
Out of hundreds of submissions, they’ve curated more than 60 footer designs so far with more to come. Some are clever, like the footer for Rows, a spreadsheet editor, which organizes its links in a spreadsheet-style grid, naturally. Others just look cool.
ChatGPT creator Open AI has an all-black background on its footer, but scroll further and you’ll see thin, white, horizontal lines that grow increasingly wider until the bottom of the page is all white. TBD, Square’s Bitcoin business, continues the site’s yellow-and-black pixel-art look all the way through to its footer, which sits underneath a glitchy animation that reveals an 8-bit Bitcoin symbol.
“Everybody puts so much investment and time into the hero section because it’s the first thing you see,” Fountain says, but there’s often less effort put into the final piece.
“I think people have eventually turned the footer into this catch-all phone book, like, I guess we’ll just put every link here,” he says. “When you get to the end and it’s just like one long group of links, okay, well, you lost me. You had that shot, you blew it.” Fountain says his favorite footers “treat that section more like graphic design rather than just being a link tree.”
Footer’s selection tends toward more minimal designs with bold type and simple calls to action. They over-index on websites from designers and creative studios, which is to be expected, but a wide range of other sites make up nearly half the database, including Ben’s Best BLNZ, a cannabis brand with a clean, simple footer, and Team Yacht, a band that uses an interactive timeline with concert dates and music releases for its footer.
Opal, a webcam and video editing software provider, uses a dynamic footer that nests the company’s links next to the descender in the logo’s letter p if your browser is wide enough. If not, the links simply sit at the bottom of the page.
“We’re featuring sites by one-person operations all the way up to the mighty Pentagram,” Cram said, noting that while footers tend to be the most often neglected part of a website, that means designers can sometimes get away with being a bit more experimental. “Maybe the client’s not paying attention, so they can kind of do cool things at the bottom.”
At the bottom of the site, Footer’s creators went full screen with a partially obscured Footer logo; to see more footers, you have to click “Load More.”
“We can’t call ourselves Footer and then have the footer be impossible to reach; that doesn’t make sense,” Fountain says. “We can’t do what we hate; we’ve got to do all the things that we love here.”
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