How building award-winning websites is the key to shaping top designers
Building websites for Awwwards is a special playground for our designers. It’s a space for experiments that can later be used to develop better digital products for clients. Read on to find out how it helps us foster award-winning designers.
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What makes an Honorable Mention special?
For designers, any recognition or award is tangible proof of their skills and competencies. For web designers, an example of such proof is an Awwwards Honorable Mention. It represents recognition by the users and jury of Awwwards.com - a digital hub for the world’s best digital artists.
At Boldare, we have won fifteen of HMs already. Mostly, we have submitted landing pages created for our clients. But for the last three submissions, we did something different. We let our designers choose the topic and build a dedicated landing page just as they wanted. We did not limit them to any specific tools, topics, or designs. There were no rules. Just free design spirit and a game of imagination. Having a lot of fun, our team produced three amazing sites which all won Honorable Mentions.
The story of how three websites became a training ground for one of our designers
Magda - one of Boldare’s designers - joined our organization in January 2021. With a strong background in graphic design, she was keen on learning UI, UX, and web design. Building a landing page for Awwwards was a perfect opportunity for her to practice new skills before using them in commercial projects. She was involved in creating two landing pages as a designer, and for the third one, she was a product owner. This is what she says about the experience:
When the project is yours it’s a lot like working on your own painting. From the very first moment of selecting a canvas to signing the piece you can feel it’s fully yours. Someone else can frame it - just like someone else might write copy for your landing page - but the art is all yours.
For the duration of work on the Very Peri page, Magda was mentored by one of our senior designers, who taught her:
- how to work with wireframes,
- how to tell a story visually, using color,
- how to think about the general design first, and then about specifics.
This knowledge was useful for Magda when she worked on the Akzidenz-Grotesk page. She could apply her prior learning and rely on feedback from her peers. And when she took on the role of product owner, she could put everything she had learned so far to the test.
Fun and passion - two ingredients for a fabulous design
When working on fun projects like these, the designers’ passion “carries” them. It’s a signal that the designer made the right calls and chose the appropriate medium. That passion can affect other team members during the brainstorming phase, where everyone is putting their best ideas forward. Passion for the project can be beneficial even in later stages of development, as Magda remembers:
There was a moment during our work on the Plantarium page where we couldn’t find the right image of one of the plants. We ended up changing plans and choosing a different plant. What’s interesting, the suggestion came from our developer, who also happened to be a plant enthusiast. Having a passion for the project makes the team work well like that.
For a designer in training, imaginative projects are an opportunity to see that web design is nothing to be afraid of. Seeing how more experienced colleagues work makes you realize that web design is just like traditional design, but produced with different tools. There are skills that translate directly, such as working with typography or creating an illustration. And taking over as a product owner is an opportunity to learn how to lead a team, work with a budget and look at the project as a whole.
What our designers learned from competing for an Honorable Mention
We have asked our designers for any advice they could give to anyone who would like to win an Honorable Mention with a project. Their advice is this: get inspired by as many top websites and excellent designers as possible. If your designers are creating a landing page for a client, they are limited by the requirements of the project. However, that should not stop them from getting inspiration from other cutting edge websites and using the newest design trends in your project.
At the same time, you should remember that your website needs to be functional. It’s easy to create a website with lavish-looking design but with no value for users. This is where the second piece of advice comes in: research before you start designing. Your designers should be finding themes, colors, and styles that meet users’ needs and expectations. Once they have them in place they can start building the digital product.
There is a trend in modern design to break the basic rules. Some websites go as far as to glitch on purpose for the sake of aesthetic effect. So our third piece of advice would be this: don’t be afraid to break the rules. We wouldn’t have won fifteen Honorable Mentions by playing it safe, so neither should you!
Why do we give designers so much freedom in building websites?
Our experience has shown us that giving designers creative freedom is the way to approach innovation. For example, the Plantarium page was our first product built entirely with no-code technology.
Having a safe space for testing new solutions before implementing them in commercial projects is a good enough reason to let designers play around with the design. They can discover new ways of turning their imagination into outstanding online products. Are you building a digital product and want to give it an award-winning look? Feel free to contact us.
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