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.
Winning an award is good for exactly one thing: you get to read your own scoresheet without bitterness. We now have two of them in the house — Orpetron's for this site, Web Design Awards' for Shichida UK — plus two nominations that scored us and gave us nothing. Four documents. Enough to look for a pattern, and the pattern is uncomfortable for anyone who thinks awards are won in the design column.
The numbers, on the table
Shichida UK, Web Design Awards, seven criteria: accessibility 8.00, performance 7.90, content 7.80, responsiveness 7.70, innovation 7.20, visual design 7.20, user experience 7.10. Aggregate 7.50. Winner.
This site, Orpetron: usability 66.1, design 65.3, development 64.5. Final 65.3. Site of the Day.
And the nominations that went no further: design 77, usability 76, technology 79. Higher design scores than either win. No title.
The taste-free categories carry the day
Read those four documents together and the story writes itself. The wins were carried by the categories that have nothing to do with taste: accessibility, performance, technical implementation, content structure. The entries that stalled posted our highest design and technology scores and still went home with nothing, because the aggregate is what clears the bar.
This is the rubric essay playing out on our own work, which is either gratifying or embarrassing depending on your disposition. Awards are averages, not peaks. We keep saying it. The juries keep proving it. The design column gets you noticed; the boring columns get you crowned.
What we would do differently
Honesty section, because the ledger is watching. Shichida's visual design score says the jury found the work coherent rather than boundary-pushing — fair, and arguably correct for an education platform read by anxious parents, but noted. This site's development score is our lowest at home and will be addressed in the next rebuild; a studio that publishes its rubric homework does not get to skip its own.
The nominations stay in the ledger permanently. If you are a prospective client, we would rather you read those two rows than the red ones. The red ones prove the floor. The others prove the page is not curated.
The only sentence that matters
Two wagers taken, two settled, £0 in fees cancelled — and a scoresheet pattern that says the method, not the mood, is doing the work. We are going to keep the method.