04 — Journal9 entries

Everything
we know,
given away.

Notes on what actually wins design awards — the rubrics, the failure modes, the parts of the craft nobody puts in a case study. No gated PDFs, no newsletter wall.

LatestJudging · 10 Oct 2026 · 7 min

What the juries rewarded

Two wins, two scoresheets, four jury documents, one pattern: the categories with no taste in them carried the day. A dissection of our own results — including the ones that stung.

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The archive

The first settled wager

Shichida UK came to us with a fragmented site and a four-month clock. On 26 September, Web Design Awards made it a winner. The fee was earned. Here is the whole story, because a ledger entry without a narrative is just accounting.

The Ledger05 Oct 2026 · 8 minRead ✓Read entry →

The site that had to win

A studio named AwardOrFree cannot lose gracefully. On 30 September our own site took Site of the Day at Orpetron. Here is what that means — and, more importantly, what it does not mean.

The Ledger01 Oct 2026 · 6 minRead ✓Read entry →

The rubric, reverse-engineered

Design awards are not a lottery and they are not a conspiracy. They are a scoring sheet. Here is what is actually on it, and where almost every entrant quietly gives away the points that decide the result.

Judging24 Aug 2026 · 11 minRead ✓Read entry →

The twelve-megabyte trophy

An entire generation of award-winning sites cannot be used on the devices most people own. We measured the problem, and then we changed how we build to avoid becoming part of it.

Performance30 Jul 2026 · 10 minRead ✓Read entry →

Brutalism became a template

Thick black borders, hard drop shadows and a clashing primary palette are now the most conformist look on the internet. What raw design was actually for, and how to get back to it.

Aesthetics02 Jul 2026 · 9 minRead ✓Read entry →

Type is the whole site

Strip out the imagery, the illustration and the motion, and typography still has to carry the page. Most sites discover too late that theirs cannot.

Typography11 Jun 2026 · 10 minRead ✓Read entry →

Nobody scrolls sideways by accident

Unconventional navigation is the fastest way to win the innovation column and the fastest way to lose the usability one. The difference comes down to a single question.

Interaction19 May 2026 · 9 minRead ✓Read entry →

Accessibility is the cheapest points on the sheet

It is a scored category on every serious rubric, most entrants fail it, and fixing it costs a fraction of what studios spend on a hero animation nobody remembers.

Craft28 Apr 2026 · 8 minRead ✓Read entry →

Written by the studio, published without an editor, corrected in public when we get something wrong.