How award-winning websites are made
This library collects the websites that win Awwwards Site of the Day or FWA of the Day, with one report for each site. Every report explains what the site sets out to say, how its layout, type and motion are built, how long a visitor waits and how much they download, and who made it.
- Reports
- 30
- Awwwards
- 19
- FWA
- 18
- Latest
- 2026.09.23
Elespacio
Elespacio's new website turns its navigation into a pile of stickers. Six small labels, each leading to a page, lean against the left edge of the screen at a tilt of a degree or two: a tall black card, an ochre card with two round corners and two square, a blue capsule and an orange one, a dark green square and a lilac card with soft corners. When the cursor rests on one of them, that sticker puffs up. When a visitor opens a page, the sticker for that page swells into a square or a strip, as if someone had just pressed a fresh one on.
Sobha Privy Collection
In the corner of the Sobha Privy Collection site's first screen sits a small map tile marked 3D. When a visitor presses it, the whole of Dubai turns into a grey 3D model, and from then on the scroll wheel is the stick of a helicopter. As the visitor scrolls, the camera lifts off over Palm Jumeirah, passes the Burj Al Arab and the Burj Khalifa, and follows the coast north to Siniya Island in Umm Al Quwain, the pins of four developments lighting up along the way.
bleibtgleich'26
The logo of bleibtgleich'26 is an irregular black shape with a dumbbell shaped slit across it, like a mask, and it turns up all over the site. When the cursor moves, the mask becomes a pool of liquid trailing behind it, with screenshots of the work showing through. When a visitor clicks any of the theme swatches lower on the page, the mask grows to half the screen height and spins twice, and the whole site turns grey, orange, olive or red. The mask is also the middle cell of the footer clock, changing material every few seconds.
Ceramic Beats
Ceramic Beats is a drum machine in the browser, where a visitor lays out a beat on a grid and it plays on a loop. Its nine tracks are the nine ceramic materials in the Metropolitan Museum's own catalogue. Each of the 144 slots stands for a real object in the collection, shown as a corner cropped from its open access photograph, and when the cursor rests on one, a visitor can see whether it is an Athenian cup from the fifth century BCE or a fifteenth century mosque lamp. When a visitor taps a slot to lay the object down and presses play, the machine sounds that material being struck, clay dull, porcelain ringing.
Gil Huybrecht
In the bottom right corner of Gil Huybrecht's black and white portfolio there is a switch with two settings, Normal and Star Wars. When a visitor flips it, the whole site reloads as a Star Wars edition, with yellow text, a starfield behind it and a blue lightsaber for a cursor. When a visitor holds F on the profile page, the introduction becomes the yellow opening crawl of the films, receding into the distance, and nothing on the site hints at it.
The Design Society
The Design Society's website presents the club that five designers started in Lyon as a secret society, then spends every line giving the secret away. The first screen calls it the least well guarded secret society in Lyon and says the entry requirement is knowing how to breathe. The members section shows their faces and asks visitors not to recognise them in the street. The visuals play along with the joke, and the whole site appears to sit behind the glass of an old cathode ray television, with scanlines, grain and darkened corners over every page.
Every Neuron
Not one of the 22,691 tangled threads on Every Neuron's first screen was drawn by an illustrator. Each is a neuron from a real male fruit fly, its shape taken from the complete map published in the journal Cell in September 2026 and rendered in the browser exactly as it is.
Pensatori Irrazionali
Pensatori Irrazionali's client list says MrBeast, Neymar and Cadillac, yet its website is built like a Renaissance book. Chapter titles are set in a 256-pixel handwritten script, with a copperplate-style angel holding a sword and a Pegasus standing beside them, and two white relief angels rise off the grey paper and move. Halfway down, four fluorescent marquee bands cross the page, one colour for each line of business, like fluorescent tape stuck onto an old book.
Boc.Studio
Boc.Studio compressed its whole introduction into one orange-red band. It is the first thing you see, lying across the middle of a film, with the studio's name, its slogan and the coordinates of Barcelona looping along it. When the cursor sweeps over it the band bends, and when the cursor moves away it springs back. One turn of the wheel shrinks the text into a wordmark, a logo made only of the name, and the band rises to become the site's header. Only after that handover does the work itself appear on screen.
Dkton
Sound cannot be seen on a web page, so Dkton borrows the instruments of the recording studio. The seven orange capsules on the first screen are level meters, gauges of loudness, rising and falling with the music, and now and then a note floats off the top of one. Further down, Dkton turns the three services into the faders of a mixing desk, with decibel (dB) readings such as +0.3 at their right end.
La Revoltosa
La Revoltosa's website lets the soda speak for itself, in the first person, on every page. I have been in Spanish bars for seventy years, I am not the homely type, I prefer after-dinner talk on a terrace, tell me what you need, darling. The speaker is drawn in tattoo style, a bob and sunglasses, a straw between her lips, a snake wound around her arms. When a visitor scrolls down, bubbles rise up the page, more of them the faster they go.
Noho
When the mouse stays still for a minute, Noho's furniture website goes into a screensaver, like a computer. The screen darkens to a deep brown and a chair drifts across it, bouncing off the edges and changing colour with every bounce, like the DVD logo that bounced around the screen of an idle DVD player. When a visitor moves the mouse, the page comes back, but the chair stays, drifting over headlines and photographs until the next time the visitor stops.
A24
Ravi Klaassens, an independent developer in the Netherlands, turned twelve A24 films into twelve spinning 3D discs, each face carrying that film's real disc artwork, and a visit downloads only 1.3 MB in total.
Hobro Digital
Hobro Digital, a digital design company in Calgary, built this site for itself and won awards on both Awwwards and The FWA with it, without writing a line of WebGL or putting a single canvas on the page.
L.I.S.A.
"Finally, some company. Talking to myself was getting weird. How can I help?" The line comes from a character called L.I.S.A., whose head is an old CRT monitor. Its job on this site is to serve as the contact form for the Canadian studio Locomotive.
Aspen Search
Aspen Search is a recruitment firm that finds people for quantitative finance, and its website is laid out like a newspaper. Ruled lines divide the page into cells, and each cell holds one thing. When a visitor hits the dark mode switch, the page does not go dark as a whole.
See What Eye See: Eye Condition Simulator
See What Eye See is a public health site about eight eye conditions, each paired with a simulator whose slider lets a visitor see how sight looks at different stages of the disease. The obvious way to build such a simulator is to start from a clear picture and let the visitor watch it fail, which leaves the visitor standing beside someone else losing their sight.
Léo Parpeix - Portfolio 2026
This site is the portfolio the French interaction designer Léo Parpeix uses to look for work. It is not a wall of thumbnails but a room you walk into. A plaster daisy with a face stands on the plinth in the middle of it, and the design drawing for that same flower hangs on the wall to its right.
ZIRKA Interceptor
ZIRKA Interceptor is the website of ZIRKA, a Ukrainian company that makes counter-drone interceptors, machines built to stop incoming drones. Hardware like this is usually sold with a product page, specifications first and advantages second. ZIRKA built the entire website as the interceptor's own control screen instead.
Cartier - Le Chœur des Pierres
This is a high jewellery piece that the French studio makemepulse built for Cartier, and its screen holds five loose stones on white silk and nothing else. When a visitor chooses one, the whole screen turns that stone's colour.
The Tuscan Journey Begins
The Tuscan Journey Begins is an advertising site the fashion label Weekend Max Mara made for a handbag, and the handbag is not its subject. MONOGRID, a creative studio in Florence, built the whole site as a hand-drawn train journey with a chapter per stop, and the first chapter spends its entire length on historic fabrics held by a silk foundation in Florence.
Warm & Fuzzy
Neutral Studio built the site for the creative company Warm & Fuzzy on one typeface, and only one weight of it. From a 14px label to a 137px headline, the hierarchy never relies on stroke thickness and rests entirely on size, which is why the font file for the whole site comes to 14 KB.
White Desert
The site for the Antarctic expedition company White Desert produces glass that refracts. Anyone can do ordinary frosted glass, but CSS backdrop-filter on its own only blurs what sits behind an element into an even mist. The glass on the five navigation buttons at the top of this site pulls the ice behind it one way in places and pushes it back in others, uneven the way real glass is.
Ascension — Pegassi
This is the release site for Ascension, the debut EP by the Belgian electronic artist Pegassi, and its /sequencer page holds a working step sequencer. The sequencer cuts a beat into 16 steps and gives each of 7 sounds its own lane, and every cell decides whether that sound plays on that step.
Cerebrium
Cerebrium sells serverless compute for AI workloads, so customers run AI models on demand without managing servers. A magenta ribbon sits behind the opening screen of its site. When a visitor scrolls halfway down the page, the ribbon coils into a sphere. When the visitor presses and holds the mouse, the camera drives into its surface until the screen shows nothing but the ribbon's material. All three forms of the ribbon come from one 3D model.
Awards Racing
Awards Racing is a drift racing game you play in the browser, and the company that made it sells waste-management software out of Dubai.
USAvionix
USAvionix builds an uncrewed aircraft that searches wide areas on its own. Its site stands 67,742 pixels tall, 71.7 screens, and holds 60 frames a second from top to bottom.
Superlocal
This is the site for Superlocal, Uruguay's international design conference, and it runs 16.5 screens long. It paints its first screen in 536ms, never once blocks the page with a long task while loading, and holds 60 frames a second all the way to the bottom. Then you open the source and find the whole thing was dragged together in Framer, a visual site builder where layout is done by drag and drop.
Gionatan Nese '26
The portfolio of the Milan designer Gionatan Nese has four pages, and not one of them has a scrollbar. Every page is exactly one screen tall, and the work floats in a white field inside a canvas. When a visitor turns the mouse wheel, it moves that field rather than the page, and when the visitor drags sideways, the field and its images travel along with the hand.
Squarespace Foundations
The website builder Squarespace turned its own brand manual into a website, and the chapter on type does not show you a finished letterform. That chapter's screen is filled by a single letter enlarged past every edge, with a row of small blue squares floating along its strokes. Those squares are bezier anchors, the points a vector editor uses to control the shape of a curve, and the site deliberately leaves them on screen.