Department 04
Every Site of the Year
Thirty-one winners of the top prize on the web, in the order the award body lists them — newest first. This is the complete visual record of what the field has considered its best work, and looked at together it tells a story no single winner does.
Eighty percent of the top prize is three-dimensional. Twenty-five of the thirty-one Sites of the Year carry a 3D, WebGL or Three.js tag. Only two — Frans Hals Museum and Simply Chocolate, both from the far end of the list — run the jQuery-and-WordPress stack that once built the whole web. Scroll to the bottom of this gallery and you are looking at the previous era of the internet.
The gallery — newest first
The Canon
Screenshots: Awwwards submission thumbnails, shown for review. Each links to its entry. Tags as classified by the award body. Order as listed by Awwwards, newest first.
Reading the canon
What the Gallery Shows
The top prize is three-dimensional. Twenty-five of thirty-one carry a 3D, WebGL or Three.js tag. Whatever the daily awards reward — and the daily board is full of typography and editorial work — the annual prize has gone overwhelmingly to sites that render.
Studios win it with their own sites. Lusion v3, Active Theory v4, Noomo, Synchronized — four of the thirty-one are studios' own portfolios. Nowhere else in commercial design does a firm's own marketing site compete for and win the industry's top prize. It says something about who the awards are really for.
Four of thirty-one winners are studios advertising themselves.
The exceptions are instructive. Pangram Pangram Foundry took the top prize with typography, Shopify and Locomotive Scroll — no 3D at all. Don't Board Me won on graphic design and storytelling alone. These are the proof that the 3D correlation is not a requirement; it is what ambitious teams happen to reach for.
You can see the internet change. The last two entries in the gallery run WordPress, jQuery, PHP and Backbone.js. Nothing in the recent half of the list resembles them. The canon is one of the few places you can watch a decade of the web's technical foundation turn over in a single scroll.