Best 18 Web Design companies - May, 2025

1. What is a Design, UI & UX agency?

It is a creative agency that provides services of the website, application, or digital design. Their work often includes the development and appraisal of design strategies. Modern design agencies use many resources on the constantly trends monitoring and user experiences collecting. This information helps them to create design concepts that are targeted on specific groups of users, for example, modern subcultures. Design agencies combining customer wishes (branding), fashion trends (for UI) and user experience (for UX) in their work.

2. How to choose a design agency?

So you have a product, and you want to get a memorable and convenient design for it. To avoid common mistakes in choosing a design agency, use our short instruction. If you have not your own design idea, then start from the 4th step, if yes - from the 1st.

1. Try to describe your vision of design in text form. Do not describe specific points, only a concept. This will help designers to find the right style for you.

2. Create a detailed list of objects for design. For a website, it will be a list of its pages: Homepage, About, Contacts, Blog e.t.g. If you want something specifical on these pages (special animation, or video background), describe this as additional explanations.

3. Try to search for design examples for similar products/websites/applications. This will allow to check your design concept viability and get acquainted with modern trends. Save particularly good solutions in a file.

4. According to the short description of the company’s activities, select on this page 10 agencies that provide services for your type of design (website, mobile application, etc.). 

5. Read case studies on their websites. Reduce your list to 5 agencies by selecting those whose case studies are most suited to your expectations.

6. Compose an email with a concept description (p.1), a list of objects for design (p. 2) and samples of the design which you like (if any exists). Add questions about project estimated cost & duration and send it to these agencies.

7. According to the received calculations, reduce your list to 3 agencies.

8. Ask these 3 agencies in the e-mail how many revisions and consultations will be available for this project.

9. Choose one from these three suggestions which is the most appropriate to your ratio of price/time/style.

3. What are the services provided by design agencies?

Almost all design subcategories interact with each other, changing own or collaborating in new working methods. Modern design agencies are constantly working to expand the list of available services to be able to provide the client with more comprehensive services. The most popular services provided by design agencies:

Game design - this area of ​​design has a very large fragmentation of specializations. The specializations that are mostly in demand: character designer, environmental designer, building designer. Fragmentation is proportionally related to the scale of the project. So in AAA-class projects, there may be separate designers for individuals, clothes or even for furniture. Game design is also can be characterized by close interaction between designers and programmers. The main reason for this is that many graphical tools need a preliminary integration into the source code.

Digital design - this is a design category that unites design for products and solutions that don't need physical implementation. This is a fairly new concept, so the debates about the right definition are still ongoing. The simplest definition of digital design - is the design that was created for use only in digital form (website, software).

Logo design - a creation of a logo for a client’s company. The logo often becomes the basis for further branding, so we recommend to pay considerable attention to the appearance and meaning which are laid in it. Examples that show that this is not so easy to create a logo as it might seem at first glance: Bayfront Bistro, Jadara Capital Partners, SwiftyBeaver.

Branding/Brand book design - creating a book that contains a detailed description of your brand or corporate identity: from logo samples to a list of allowed color palettes in the company product design. The brand book allows customers to create a single style for all marketing and PR, which greatly simplifies the further work of designers. The duration of branding depends on the size of the customer’s company. Here are some examples of brand books for world-famous brands: Skype, Twitter, Viber.

Mobile app design - for mobile platforms, can not be used rules identical to desktop systems. Mobile designers use special approaches in building user interaction which is based on the lowest sizes of the screens and existing touch controls. This is the main reason why mobile design is characterized by the dominance of UX over UI. Case studies of design development for mobile platforms: Shake App, Willage App, City iLove.

Graphic design - in the past it was the main section of design. But today it is just one of the design subsections. The main instruments in graphic design are: typography and elements layout on the page. Graphic design laid down the basic rules for projecting layouts and proved the influence of fonts on the overall perception of composition. Today, GD saves its dominance in typography, and in the digital area, its ideas have been extended and used to formulate basic UI rules.

Product design - designing the appearance of the product. The main distinguishing feature of this type of design is that it involves the creation of physical prototypes. For successful implementation, it needs a deep market analysis and user experience research. Often carried out as part of company branding.

Website design - creating or redesigning website pages according to some style. Also, this includes the developing branded templates for publications and UX-optimization for menu buttons. This service provides only layouts creation, but almost all companies on this page also offer services for its implementation in the site structure and source code. Case studies that show the importance of good web design: Platte Valley, StoneStreets.

Customized theme design for the website - designing themes and templates for content management systems and website builders. A custom theme makes any website more original, which significantly increases chances to catch visitors' attention and make them stay. Here you can find officially published themes for Wordpress and Shopify.

4. How much does the design service cost? 

We completed our own research about the cost of typical design services. These services also have characteristics for IT costing segmentation according to agency location. The highest prices, as usual, are in North America and Western Europe, and the lowest prices are in Asia and the Pacific. As well, the final cost of the design project could be influenced by several factors:

1. The agency’s fame - the higher the agency’s popularity, the higher its pricing. This is caused by the fact that such agencies have a big portfolio, which indicates their high professionalism and immediate interest from clients. Agencies with a small client base can provide identical operations by lower prices. It is important to note that low price is a very unreliable indicator of agency professionalism level, so we recommend to choose them according to their portfolio of successfully completed projects.

2. Project's difficulty - the estimation is carried out on the basis of the amount of work that needs to be performed. For standard projects, there are generally accepted "units of complexity": for websites, it is the number of pages, for applications it is the number of developed windows, etc. However, companies can use their own costing calculation methods, so the assessment for the same project can differ in every company.

3. Additional services - many agencies provide their services as the "package of services". In many cases, it is included, the number of revisions and consultations. We recommend pre-discuss the amount of these services, and order at least 2 revisions and 1 consultation for every project.

5. When a design agency is better than own full-day designer?

The reason for hiring own designer depends on the amount of work you can provide to him. For example, a small business that will produce typical products for a long time doesn`t need to hire own designer. Because it will create unnecessary staff costs for the owner and limit the growth of this designer, leaving him without practical experience. For the short term, it would be better to hire a design agency. There are two main arguments for this. The first - agency employees are highly qualified, thanks to the constant work with design projects. The second argument - the cost of a one-time service, for example, website designing, will be much less than in the case with its own designer.

The low cost of services can be explained that the agency's announce-only terms and the final cost of the project, while the designer needs to receive salaries regularly. We completed research about average salaries for designers. As a data source, we used the vacancies regarding hiring the designers with different expertise in the UK. We chose this country because according to their mentality many vacancies indicate the proposed salary. According to collected data, we received the average cost of an hour of work for designers of 3 levels: Junior, Middle и Senior.

6. Why do I need to hire a design agency?

Users evaluate products by their appearance, and many good projects were failed because their interface did not find a response from users. Therefore, today design costs take a significant part in the budget of any project. The importance and cost of design require the involvement of true professionals because the price of an error is too high. If you hire any acknowledged design agency from our list you will get a professional design team with next advantages:

1. Agencies help to save staff costs because you don't need to hire designers on a full-day.

2. It is available the capability to order additional rounds of consultations or design revisions.

3. They work according to detailed and agreed Technical Statement which helps to avoid typical misunderstandings.

4. You can check agency qualifications in its portfolio or by contacting its customers.

5. Employees in design agencies have strict specialization, which allows them to improve their skills quicker than "universal" designers.

6. All issues can be resolved with the design team head.

7. Design agency - it`s the easiest way to keep own corporate identity up-to-date due to the trends.

8. Experienced designers can be mentors which help to transform the design idea into a fully-integrated concept.

9. Agencies in their work use regular specialized research in UI and UX efficiency.

10. Their price list of company services can be founded on the website or ordered by email.

7. What is UI/UX design?

The confusion between these terms was appeared due to the fact that many designers combine the positions of UI designer and UX designer. It gives an ambiguous effect. On the one hand, this greatly speeds up the design process. But on the other hand, these designers often ignore UX for creating the unusual visual parts of the interface. 

User Interface (UI) design - it’s the visual part of the interface. UI designing includes compiling a color palette for elements and panels, selecting fonts and their characteristics, and initially mocking up elements sizes at the interface layout.

User Experience (UX) design - interface customization, from the point of convenience for the user. First of all, this is based on predicting user activities behavior. To make it more clear many modern applications have built-in systems that automatically collect user experience and send it to developers. So in UI, designers create a unique part of the design which will distinguish the product from competitors. And the UX designers help them to keep this design in the acceptance for using borders.