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Five lists, and what is on them.
What is current in web design, counted rather than remembered. Every row is measured from sites that won something, and every one shows a winner that carries it.
Each row carries two figures, and they answer different questions. The share says how much of the field does this. The movement underneath says which way it is going, comparing the newest 120 winners with the 592 before them. They disagree more often than you would expect: the most common look on this page is one of the falling ones.
Top 5 — Looks
What the winners look like
Every winner’s look, described in its own words, folded into the families those words keep landing in.
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Fashion editorial
Laid out like a magazine — big pictures, confident type, lots of air.
20%about 1 in 5 winners falling22% → 15%
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
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Cinematic realism
Shot and graded like film, and composed like a frame from one.
17%about 1 in 6 winners holding17% → 17%
The New Mobile Workforce
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Swiss modernist
A strict grid, one sans-serif, and nothing that is not needed.
15%about 1 in 7 winners holding15% → 14%
Design Canada
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3D and CGI
Objects built rather than photographed, lit and turned in real space.
12%about 1 in 8 winners holding12% → 12%
Nike Reactor
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Period revival
Borrowed wholesale from another decade, down to the type.
7%about 1 in 14 winnerstoo few yet to call
Sleep Well Creative
Counted over the 410 winners the vision pass has read. Four families sit below the cut, and 18% match none of them.
Top 5 — Colour
The colours actually being used
Sampled from the winners themselves rather than named from memory — which colours turn up in a palette, and how often.
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Blue
The safe loud colour — it reads as trustworthy and nobody has to be talked into it.
20%about 1 in 5 winners rising19% → 22%
Kode Sports Club
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Red
Used as a single accent far more often than as a ground.
17%about 1 in 6 winners rising16% → 20%
CANALS
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Orange
The warm end of the same job, and the one that has grown fastest.
17%about 1 in 6 winners falling17% → 15%
Couro Azul
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Green
Almost always literal — growth, produce, the outdoors.
10%about 1 in 10 winners holding10% → 11%
Lando Norris
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Yellow
Rarely more than a flash of it, because it will not hold text.
9%about 1 in 11 winnerstoo few yet to call
I-remember
Across 392 sampled palettes. Grounds are counted apart, since a ground is not a colour choice in the same sense: 45% carry a near-white and 35% a near-black. A palette holding two families is counted in both.
Top 5 — Motion
What moves, and how much
The most settled answer on this site: more than half of everything that wins is animated.
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Animation
things move
52%more than half of winners holding52% → 50%
Into the Storm
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Transitions
smooth changes from one screen to the next
21%about 1 in 5 winners holding21% → 23%
In My World
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Microinteractions
small reactions — a button answers when you touch it
20%about 1 in 5 winners rising20% → 22%
20 Years of Xbox Museum
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Gestures / Interaction
you drag, throw or swipe it rather than click it
10%about 1 in 10 winners rising10% → 12%
The Renaissance Edition
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Sound-Audio
the page makes sound
8%about 1 in 13 winners rising8% → 9%
2°C EARTH
Share of all 712 winners carrying the award body’s own tag. A site usually carries several.
Top 5 — Navigation
How people are got around
The patterns winners use to move a reader through a site, ranked by how many of them use it.
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Unusual Navigation
menus you have to work out
11%about 1 in 9 winnerstoo few yet to call
Gleec Chat
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Parallax
a background sliding slower than the text, to fake depth
10%about 1 in 10 winnerstoo few yet to call
Air Jordan 2012
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Fullscreen
images running right to the edges, no border
9%about 1 in 11 winners holding9% → 9%
Sortie en mer (a trip out to sea)
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Gallery
a grid of thumbnails to browse
9%about 1 in 11 winnerstoo few yet to call
StringTune
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Footer Design
the strip at the very bottom, actually designed
6%about 1 in 17 winners rising5% → 12%
Bennett & Clive
Share of all 712 winners. Ordinary scrolling is left out — at 22% it would take the top row, and it is not a way of getting anywhere.
Top 5 — Rising
What is climbing fastest
Not the biggest — the fastest. How much more common each one is among the newest winners than among everything before them.
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Footer Design
the strip at the very bottom, actually designed
2.24×about 1 in 8 of the newest winners rising5% → 12%
Shed
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Photographic
photographs doing the work, not graphics
1.62×about 1 in 20 of the newest winners rising3% → 5%
Floema
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Single page
the whole site on one page
1.51×about 1 in 13 of the newest winners rising6% → 8%
Apple AirPods Pro
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Filters and Effects
images altered live — blur, grain, distortion
1.38×about 1 in 11 of the newest winners rising7% → 9%
2021 Virtual Webbys
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Storytelling
the page walks you through something, in order
1.28×about 1 in 4 of the newest winners rising23% → 28%
CHILE20
The newest 120 winners against the 592 before them. A multiplier, so a small pattern that doubles outranks a large one that creeps.
How to read these
What a figure here is, and is not.
Every number on this page is a share of sites that won an award, which makes it a description of what juries have been rewarding — not of the web, and not of what works. A pattern can be common here because it is genuinely good, or because it is fashionable, and a countdown cannot tell those apart. The section pages can, in places, and say so where they can.
The movement figure compares two slices of the same corpus, so it is a reading about recent award winners rather than a forecast. Where a row says too few yet to call, the pattern turns up fewer than ten times among the newest winners: a ratio over six or seven sites swings by a sixth when one more lands, and a printed multiplier would look as solid there as one built on sixty. Those rows get a share and no direction until the count supports one.
The lists are also not independent of each other. A site is usually animated and full-bleed and blue, so it is counted in several rows, and the percentages within a list do not add to a hundred and are not meant to.
Each countdown names its own denominator, because they differ: the looks are counted over the winners a vision pass has read, the colours over those with a sampled palette, and the rest over the whole confirmed corpus.