Design awards influence the web more than many people realize. They set standards, shift aesthetics, and influence which designers get seen.
As a website design tool, Readymag has taken part in and won international design awards, and has also been running its own annual award for 12 years. Being both a participant and an organizer has given us a practical understanding of how awards work, and we’re sharing some of our insights—from entry fees and submission formats to prizes and types of recognition.
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Why design awards matter
At the industry level, awards help us agree on what good design looks like right now. Formally, the industry has guides, patterns, and textbooks. But in practice, quality standards are also shaped by juries and award shortlists. Awards act as a filter: from the whole stream of design works, they bring a few dozen pieces to the surface as benchmarks. They also capture shifts in the profession. One year, shortlists fill up with monochrome, minimalist interfaces; another year, bright experimental layouts break grids left and right. These selections become a quick barometer of visual language and user expectations.Finally, awards act as translators between design language and everyday language. Studios often find it easier to explain the value of design to clients through an award than through a 20-page methodology.
For a designer or studio, an award is social capital. It can be shown in a portfolio, featured on a website, used in case studies, or dropped into a presentation. International awards act as gateways to other markets. The human factor also shouldn’t be underestimated. Sometimes external recognition is what keeps creatives afloat. An award, or even a shortlist, becomes a tangible culmination of effort. And another layer is that awards educate the industry through feedback and examples. For many practicing designers, the shortlist of a strong award is more useful than yet another design book because it offers fresh, working examples with clear context.
The less visible side of design awards
From a professional standpoint, participating in awards can be seen as an investment. But in many cases, it quickly becomes clear that participants pay less for expert evaluation than for access to a showcase.
High entry fees
Most international awards were originally built for markets with high purchasing power—primarily the US and Western Europe. For them, a $200–$400 entry fee feels like a normal marketing expense. But from the perspective of a studio in Eastern Europe, Latin America, or Asia, the barrier becomes much higher. In practice, this means many awards end up being more accessible to those already positioned in wealthier markets.
Consider this down-to-earth question: what does it actually cost to run an award? There’s an organizing team, a technical platform, promotion, a jury, and maybe an offline ceremony. But when entry fees rise year after year, submissions increase, and budgets remain opaque, it can start to feel as if financial growth is treated as a success alongside—if not ahead of—the recognition of strong work.
If participation fees form the core of the business model, awards become a sort of financial filter. It’s not weak entries that get filtered out, but those without the budget, confidence, or infrastructure to submit. A strong but independent designer might slip under the radar, while larger agencies appear more frequently.
Then comes the next level: winner fees. You’ve already paid to enter and you’ve passed the selection, but sometimes the expenses continue: a physical trophy, a printed catalog, the official winner symbol. This creates a hierarchy even among the winners, based not on design quality but on willingness to pay further.
Inflated categories
When an award has 3–7 categories, it makes sense: different media, tasks, and competencies. But when the list expands to dozens, it can start to feel as though categories are multiplied mainly to increase the number of entries and winners. Again, this naturally benefits larger studios. Their chances of winning something rise dramatically because they can afford more submissions.
For the industry, though, this sometimes results in a kind of inflation. When hundreds of winners appear, exclusivity becomes harder to understand. Potential clients may struggle to interpret what a specific award actually represents: genuine recognition or simply a cleverly chosen niche category. Formally, more categories produce more winners. In reality, they blur the guidelines.
Building a fairer format with Readymag Websites of the Year
When we say Websites of the Year is an accessible award, we don’t mean lowering the bar or handing out prizes to everyone. Accessibility, for us, means giving everyone who meets the basic requirements a fair opportunity to participate. If you have a great website on Readymag, you can apply, regardless of your country, studio budget, or your ability to fill out complex forms. We separate two things clearly: who gets to start the race and who ultimately wins it. The first should be as open as possible. The second should be as demanding as possible.
This is the logic behind having no entry fees. Removing financial barriers reflects the environment we work in: Readymag is used globally, by teams and individuals with very different circumstances. A free submission process allows the award to reflect that reality more accurately and help us see the full range of strong projects made with our tool.
It also signals what the award is meant to be. Readymag Websites of the Year is an extension of the product, not a standalone commercial attraction. It’s a way to highlight the strongest work made with Readymag and to support the people behind it. At its core, the award exists to celebrate how people use our tool creatively.
Another important point is reducing friction during submission. In some competitions, the submission becomes a project of its own, with long texts, case videos, forms, payments, confirmations… and the process often discourages people before they even apply. We have one clear entry criterion: the website must be built on Readymag. If it’s new and you want to show it off, you’re already eligible. From there, we ask only for what the jury and organizing team genuinely need. For participants, this lowers the entry barrier: you don’t spend hours polishing an application, and you can submit multiple projects without interruption. For organizers, it enables us to evaluate a living product, not a presentation about it.
We also aim for clarity in how winners are selected. This means transparent criteria and a shared commitment to look at why a solution works, not just whether it looks good. It’s a straightforward approach for a product-based award: we’re responsible for our own segment of the industry, and want to make the process as fair and transparent as possible.
This year’s approach to choosing winners
If you ask any designer which part of an award generates the most debate and dissatisfaction, it’s always the final choice of the winner. And there are two main reasons for this. First, there’s no absolute objectivity in design. It’s not a sport where you can measure results with a stopwatch. Second, popularity ≠ quality. Some projects go viral easily, some studios have highly active communities, and big names get an automatic boost.
I there is no ideal, objective model, how do we make the selection process as fair, transparent, and comprehensive as possible?
As specialists working with design daily—both product and visual—we’ve long seen that a single method of choosing a winner is always reductive. It forces one evaluation logic, and design almost never fits into a single framework. So with Websites of the Year 2025, we did what we’d do in any complex evaluation: we broke down “best website” into three different types of recognition.
1. Public voting
Public voting shows which projects resonate emotionally, who people are willing to support, and what is perceived as cool beyond professional filters. It’s an honest, democratic metric, but it’s naturally influenced by the size of a contestant’s audience.
2. Jury selection
Experts see nuances invisible to the general public, distinguish between “beautiful” and “conceptually correct,” and understand execution complexity, compositional precision, and UI logic. We put care into forming a diverse jury with different areas of expertise, and we asked the jury members to describe and explain their choices to make the thinking behind each decision visible. This way, the criteria become clear and the result gains credibility.
3. Readymag design team selection
We evaluate projects as people who understand which works move Readymag’s and design culture forward. We know what it takes to create certain interactions with Readymag, and we can recognize the level of complexity and effort behind them. In a way, this is a metric of innovation—something neither public voting nor a traditional jury can fully capture.
Together, these three recognitions create a holistic picture that single-metric competitions simply cannot. This model is fairer because it reduces bias, prevents any one approach from dictating the rules, and makes the selection more diverse and reflective of the industry’s reality.
What the winners receive
We believe the best reward for a designer is new opportunities. In previous years, our prizes took different forms, and we eventually realized that people need different things at different stages of their careers. What is consistent is our focus on giving winners promotion and a Readymag subscription to support their next projects.
Readymag is used by a large ecosystem of designers, studios, brand managers, and creative directors. Sharing winners’ stories across our channels increases their chances of being noticed by decision-makers. It’s publications, features, and media coverage that get your project in front of the right people.
Pick your favorite
Public voting for Websites of the Year is now open and will run until November 28.
From all the submissions, we’ve curated a list of the 25 strongest websites. It’s a concentrated collection of ideas: different approaches to typography, storytelling, animation, and interactivity. Beyond voting, it’s a great way to see where web design is heading—all in one evening.
