Santioni Spirits Heron AI Colonia Zacamil Aspen Search CoMinVi Odyssée Sobha Privy Collection LxL Creative Noho Moto Finance The Tie-break The Tuscan Journey Begins Nick Ho Milledollars Santioni Spirits Heron AI Colonia Zacamil Aspen Search CoMinVi Odyssée Sobha Privy Collection LxL Creative Noho Moto Finance The Tie-break The Tuscan Journey Begins Nick Ho Milledollars
Updated 13 October 2026 Awwwards ● The FWA ● CSS Design Awards

Exhibita

A journal of the best-designed websites

The short version

Out: thumbnail grids.In: true depth.

thumbnail grids fell from 14% to 5% of award winners in a year, while true depth went from 33% to 40%.

In My World, a winner carrying thumbnail grids
thumbnail grids falling · 14%→5% In My World, 2017
Why Zero, a winner carrying true depth
true depth rising · 33%→40% Why Zero, 2026
01 — The short answer

What's hot

Five countdowns: what the winners look like, the colours they use, what moves, how people are got around, and what is climbing fastest. Every row shows a winner carrying it, and says whether it is rising or falling.

 02 — Which way this is heading

In & Out

Down: giant headlines, 25% to 15%. Up: a guided sequence, 22% to 29%. Every movement in the record, counted two independent ways, with the ones both counts agree on marked.

 03 — Ranked by the jury

Top rated

Every recent winner in the order the jury scored it, this week's arrivals, and the live board from five award sources.

 04 — What they have in common

Trends

The whole record read at once: which traits cluster, which have moved, and what separates one kind of site from another.

 05 — Browse by kind of business

Categories

Shops, museums, restaurants, studios — 20 kinds of site, because a bakery and a bank are not the same brief and should not arrive at the same page.

 06 — Browse by decision

Craft

Colour, structure and motion — the three decisions every project makes, and what each one signals about the kind of site you are making.

 07 — What tomorrow looks like

Futurism

Work about AI, space and the synthetic has a shared look — and it is not the dark, glowing one every brief reaches for first.

 08 — One list, eight ways

Wire

Today's arrivals drawn eight different ways — marquee, poster, mosaic, terminal, contact sheet — and what each arrangement does to the same material.

 09 — The screen it is really seen on

Phone

What phone-first work does differently — the order of things rather than the look of them — and which kinds of site fall apart when the wide composition goes.

 10 — How people get around a page

Navigation

Which patterns are rising, which are going, and what a route people have to learn really costs — measured against the jury's own usability marks.

 11 — Showing your own work

Portfolios

A portfolio that wins is built out of pages, not spectacle — a real project page and a real about page beat every effect client work reaches for. Six ways of putting the work in front of someone.

 12 — The first screen

Landings

The landing pages the galleries are showing this week, and what a winning first screen ships before any JavaScript runs.

 13 — What the first screen says

Words

The headlines off 299 winners' own home pages, word for word. 78% of them address nobody — no you, no we — which is the opposite of every instruction ever given about writing for the web.

 14 — A sister publication

GoGoViral

GOGOVIRAL: how things spread, with every rule marked twice — once for how confident we are, once for what the evidence did to it.

 15 — Presenting yourself

Designers

A grid of thumbnails to browse on 21% of designers’ own sites against 6% of studios’, and 3D on 22% against 35% — with real designers explaining their own practice, and a live shelf of personal sites.

 16 — The work ahead

What's next

Which design jobs are growing, which are shrinking, and roughly when.

 17 — How the numbers are made

How it's judged

Design 40, usability 30, creativity 20, content 10. Eighteen jurors, the three most extreme scores discarded, and a five-day clock.

 18 — Who keeps winning

Studios

The all-time table: which studios clear the bar again and again, where they are, and the different strategies behind it.

 19 — Sites taken apart

Case files

Winners looked at closely — including the ones that took the top prize with almost none of the technology everyone assumes is required.

 20 — Every Site of the Year

Canon

The top prize on the web, all of it in one gallery. Scroll to the oldest and you are looking at the flat web of a decade ago.

 21 — What they are built with

Stack

How movement gets choreographed, how depth gets drawn, and why those skills are becoming teachable rather than rare.

The story 11 October 2026

Chrome Brings Back the Photographer’s Image Format

Chrome 155, released on 6 October, can now show pictures saved as JPEG XL, a format built for high-quality photographs. Safari has shown them since 2023, so a site built around its pictures can now send them in this format to visitors on both.

One photograph, as it arrives

First moments

Partway

Finished

An illustration of gradual loading. Chrome shows JPEG XL photographs this way; Safari shows the format but not this step-by-step sharpening.

JPEG XL is a picture format made for photographs. Chrome’s engineers say it makes files 30 to 50 percent smaller than an ordinary JPEG, can save a picture with no loss of quality at all, and can carry HDR images: photographs with brighter highlights and deeper shadows than an ordinary picture, shown at full strength on screens built to display them.

Google tried the format in Chrome once before, hidden behind a setting most people never saw, and removed it at the end of 2022. Apple added it to Safari the following year. Chrome’s team now says it has brought the format back because web developers kept asking for it, year after year.

Read the full storyClose

The change a visitor will notice is how a large photograph arrives. A JPEG XL picture can appear whole almost at once, soft at first, and then sharpen as the rest of the file comes in, instead of leaving an empty frame or filling in from the top down. For a full-screen photograph at the top of a page, the first impression is the picture itself, not a gap waiting for it.

Photographs already saved as JPEGs can be repacked as JPEG XL with nothing lost. Apple’s WebKit team, which builds Safari, puts the saving at about a fifth of the file size on average. An archive of images gets lighter without a single pixel changing.

Chrome’s engineers suggest trying it alongside AVIF, the other modern picture format, and expect JPEG XL to be “most helpful for high-fidelity or lossless compression, especially of photographic images.” Firefox can show the format only in its Nightly test version for now, so a site offers the JPEG XL picture with an ordinary JPEG behind it, and each browser takes the one it can show. Nobody sees a broken image.

Why it mattersFor a site whose subject is its pictures, such as a photographer, a hotel or a fashion label, the big photographs can now go out at higher quality for the same file size in Chrome and Safari, with an ordinary JPEG kept for everyone else.

Photography website design: examples and trends →

Earlier stories →

Sources: Chrome for Developers: Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome · Chrome Status: JPEG XL decoding support · WebKit: Features in Safari 17.0 · Chromium: remove JPEG XL support (2022) · Can I use: JPEG XL