Site of the Day Teardowns
This archive documents every Awwwards and FWA Site of the Day with an in-depth teardown. Each report examines the concept, visual design, interaction and front-end build behind the award, with performance and asset data measured in a real browser.
- Reports
- 56
- Awwwards
- 31
- FWA
- 37
- Latest
- 2026.10.05
INHERITED
On its website, the deathcore band INHERITED splits its own name into four pieces and wedges them between the bodies of its three members, as if the three of them were holding the name apart. Every large headline on the page keeps trembling slightly, and now and then its edges tear open in a thin line, like a videotape with a bad signal. The site barely relies on words, since a red wall, black clothes and a series of faces shot very close up are all the introduction the band gives its visitors.
EDOLUS
The EDOLUS website introduces an artificial intelligence infrastructure company through seven 3D scenes that flow into one another. The camera starts at a satellite in Earth orbit, drops into a desert city, dives into a chip inside a server room and ends up behind a car. Scrolling through it feels like watching a product launch film whose pace the visitor controls, and the music changes its arrangement with every scene. Only at the very end does the screen say Edolus never existed, and the company turns out to have been made up from the start.
Kinoria
Kinoria is a fully mechanical 35mm camera that does not exist, and its website does not stop at describing it. The site hands the camera to the visitor along with four frames of film. The visitor loads a roll, raises the finder to four scenes that are playing as moving footage, and presses the shutter. Each frame locks the moment it is taken, with no preview and no delete. The four prints then develop slowly in a darkroom and land on a wall covered with other framings of the same scenes.
Night Drive Racing Game
Night Drive Racing Game fits a whole open-world racing game into a web page. A visitor who opens the link can drive a sports car anywhere in a rain-soaked neon city full of jobs, street races and dozens of hidden symbols to find. Players can also get out and walk, swap cars in a garage, or send a link that brings up to three friends into the same city. The reflections in the puddles, the raindrops on the bodywork and the water on the lens are all calculated live by the graphics card.
Tengile MalaMala Collection
Tengile MalaMala Collection runs safari lodges near South Africa's Kruger National Park, and its website gives the most unusual animation on the homepage to conservation rather than to the rooms. On the conservation screen, the heading Preserving Life's Balance is ringed by six small photos, from a rhino and a young impala to a hand holding a tiny flower. When a visitor scrolls there, the photos spread out along an ellipse and then keep circling the heading, taking about fifty seconds per lap.
Long Hoang Portfolio
Long Hoang has turned his job-hunting portfolio into a game in which the visitor drives a tank. After the start screen, the visitor steers a small lime green tank from a grassy hill into a cartoon factory, where the author's four projects are loaded into a machine with a screen. When the visitor parks the tank in front of the machine and presses a key, the camera drops to ground level, the screen lights up with a project, and a card shaped like torn paper appears beside it. A visitor with no time to play can press a button at the bottom of the screen, and the tank is delivered directly to the work.
Milledollars
The video production company MilleDollars has built a website where the films themselves are the interface. Every screen of the home page is one film, and when a visitor nudges the scroll wheel, that film shrinks into a rounded card and slides away upward while the next one rises from below. The works page is normally just a neat list of text, but wherever the cursor rests, the whole page fills with that project's film, and even the divider above it turns into a hand-drawn scribble.
Colonia Zacamil
The Colonia Zacamil website puts a neighbourhood's before and after into one 3D model that a visitor can fly into. The visitor looks down on a hand-painted model of apartment blocks in El Salvador, with a switch at the bottom of the screen that reads PRESENT. When the visitor flips the switch, the murals fade from the walls, the people and the brightly coloured cars disappear, and the whole district returns to the grey-green place it was before the work began. When the visitor flips it back, fourteen murals reappear, and each one can be opened to hear the artist explain how that wall came about.
Heron AI
Heron AI's home page makes the visitor play plan checker. The first screen is a house elevation drawn on a drafting sheet, and the cursor becomes the crosshair of a design program. When the visitor drags a box around a red dot on the house, an orange card pops up saying that the building code requires a handrail here. Heron sells an AI assistant that checks architects' models for exactly this kind of violation, and the home page lets visitors do that job by hand before the product offers to do it for them.
Arthur Engel Portfolio
Arthur Engel's portfolio makes the visitor walk through a stone gateway before any of his work appears. The first scene after entering is a stone arch covered in vines in a dark jungle. As the visitor scrolls, the stones of the arch burst apart one by one, hang in the air and reassemble into a ring of glowing blue runes. A blue-white vortex spins open inside the ring, the camera dives into it and through a flash of white light, and lands in a dark valley where his six projects live inside a single glowing crystal. After the projects, a few threads of light weave through the dark, gather into a stem and bloom into a glowing lily, and that is his introduction. The last scene of the journey is a hand reaching into a shaft of warm light next to the words REACH OUT.
CoMinVi
CoMinVi's website turns the five metals it mines into a single turning rock. When a visitor reaches the minerals section, a pale grey lump of gold ore stands in the middle of the page. As the visitor keeps scrolling, the rock slowly rotates and its surface becomes silver ore, lead ore, greenish copper ore and finally zinc, while the list of names on the left lights up from Gold to Zinc. Instead of a product table explaining what it digs, an underground mining contractor lets the visitor turn all five ores by hand.