CSS Winner is a web design gallery where experts review sites and assign them marks: a nomination, a "star" or "site of the day" status. The rating a piece receives goes into the project card and stays publicly available. For a studio it is public confirmation of quality that clients and industry peers alike can see.
The client was Arbeko, a company working in architectural decor, meaning the elements that dress facades and interiors. Its site is conceived as a calling card, a brief introduction to the company without an extensive catalogue. The CSS Winner write-up says:
the showcase site, created by our agency, will introduce you to the Arbeko company
That wording sets the project's main task. The site had to explain in short order what the company does, and do it as neatly as the products themselves look.
Form as the main argument
A brand built on attention to form and detail inherently demands the same attitude to its interface. Decor, whether a cornice, a rosette or the surround of an opening, is sold through the precision of its lines and proportions. So in the site the design rests on the same principles the client applies to its own products: restraint, order and attention to the smallest things.
Work on the Arbeko site took place at a time when the bureau had long been active on international platforms. The bureau's founder, Bogdan Gnatyuk, steadily developed the studio, which by 2017 had become prominent in the Russian-language and international digital community, and projects of this kind served as its support.
Spring and autumn 2017
The spring of 2017 brought the studio other marks as well. On 16 January the BizzGrid site received an Awwwards Honorable Mention, and on 17 January CSS Winner gave it "site of the day" status. On 4 February "site of the day" on CSS Winner went to the site of the M1 Club Hotel. The Arbeko site was the next link in that series: on 1 May it was marked with a "star" and a rating of 7.5.
In summer the series continued. On 23 August CSS Winner awarded "site of the day" to the Pyvovarov project with a rating of 7.6. The next day CSS Design Awards (CSSDA) marked the same site with a Special Kudos award and a rating of 7.63, and on 25 August Awwwards chose it as site of the day and gave the developers a Developer Award, with ratings of 7.13 and 7.17.
In September the studio received two more CSS Winner marks. On 13 September the Style Whisperer site appeared on Awwwards with an Honorable Mention nomination, on 16 September it earned a "star" on CSS Winner, and that same month CSSDA marked it with a special award. On 28 September the Helicopter View site earned a CSS Winner "star".
The same rating as its own
The rating of 7.5 was familiar to the studio itself. On 13 June 2015 CSS Winner gave "site of the day" status to the bureau's own site with the same rating. Before that the site had gone through CSSDA, CSS Nectar and CSS Light, and after CSS Winner it earned recognition on several more platforms, among them Awwwards.
The Runet Creativity Rating also reflected the trajectory of the work. In 2017 the studio took 4th place with 23.32 points, and in 2018 it placed 10th on the same measure, scoring 12.25 points.
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