In one week I was advised to add a WebGL nautilus, audio feedback on the buttons, inertia scrolling and two licensed display faces. Every one of those recommendations was aimed at the fifth of the score that matters least. The thing actually breaking the site was a caching header.
I have been rebuilding my own practice site, and because I am a strategist and cannot help myself, I asked a number of people what they would change. The advice arrived quickly and it was confident. A three-dimensional shell rendered in WebGL. Subtle mechanical click sounds on the navigation. Lenis smooth scroll paired with GSAP ScrollTrigger. Canela, or possibly Ogg, paired with a technical monospace.
Nobody mentioned that seventy-five images were loading eagerly with no declared dimensions.
The spectacle everyone optimises for is worth a fifth of the score.
Awwwards publishes how its jury scores a site. Almost nobody reads it before taking design advice.
Design and Usability are seventy per cent of the score. They are also the two things that never appear in a moodboard, because neither photographs well.
From an analysis of twenty-four Site of the Day winners, measured in the browser rather than described.
I ran the same measurements against my own site. It was not flattering.
Headline at 118px, past the ninety-six-pixel bar the winners share. This is the part I had spent weeks on, and the part worth least.
Not one carried a declared width or height. Every page reflowed as the images arrived — the layout shifting under the reader's eye while they tried to read.
Every image on every page loaded immediately, including the ones eight screens down. Fixed in an afternoon. Nobody had mentioned it in a month of feedback.
Which is the smallest weight of the four, and the one most people believe they are being judged on.
This is why the finding travels.
Replace the words and the shape holds. In brand and growth, Design is your positioning and the coherence of the system beneath it. Usability is whether the business can actually run it — whether the team knows what to say, whether the offer is buyable, whether the promise survives contact with delivery. Creativity is the identity refresh, the campaign, the film. Content is the words on the page.
Now look at where the budget goes. Almost every engagement I am invited into arrives with money allocated to the twenty per cent and none to the seventy. The rebrand is approved; the positioning underneath it is assumed. The campaign is commissioned; nobody has resolved which of the four offers it is selling. The film is beautiful and the enquiry form still takes two working days to answer.
Then the work launches, the numbers do not move, and the conclusion is that the creative was wrong. It usually was not. It was carrying seventy per cent that had never been built.
Spectacle is a differentiator only after the fundamentals are in place.
What travels from this to the next build.
Before you buy the thing that will be admired, find out what is being scored. Almost every field has a published rubric, and almost nobody reads it before taking advice — because the rubric is dull and the advice is exciting.
The advice I was given was not wrong, exactly. A WebGL shell would have been beautiful. It would also have been the fifth thing that mattered, added to a site whose images had no dimensions and whose stylesheet was frozen by a caching header nobody had checked. Ask what is worth seventy per cent, and build that first. It will be less interesting to talk about, and it is the whole job.
Eight short things on brand, growth and taste, every week. Four minutes. The pieces worth expanding end up here as Field Notes.