Awards from other juries now count in Reach

Reach was built on one measurable thing: the link strength of a studio's own site and of every site it built. It is a fair number, and it is blind in one direction. It cannot tell a site that a jury picked from a site nobody looked at twice.

Juries have been answering exactly that question for twenty years. Their verdicts are public, they are dated, and each one names the studio. That makes them observable, which is the only kind of fact this register takes.

A new tab: Awards

Every studio card now has an Awards tab next to Achievements. The two are kept apart on purpose. Achievements are places Nomansite gives: the monthly snapshots, the top lists. Awards are given by other juries, and each one links to the page where the jury gave it.

Awards arrive in two ways.

We read The FWA ourselves. The FWA publishes its archive as open data: every case, every studio credited on it, every award with its date. We read it every day, and the whole archive every week. The first pass found 15,601 awards across 10,785 pieces of work.

Studios send the rest. Most juries publish their winners only as web pages, and we do not crawl those. Instead the studio pastes the link to the page where it was awarded, in the Awards section of its account, and writes what it received. An editor opens the link and checks by hand that the award is real and the studio is named on it. Nothing shows on a card until it is confirmed, and the studio gets a letter either way.

How much an award weighs

An award adds to Reach by two things: who gave it and at what level.

The large industry juries, the Webbys, Cannes Lions, D&AD, The One Show, Clio, Red Dot and iF, start at 60. Awwwards, The FWA and CSS Design Awards start at 40. Specialist awards and curated galleries such as Behance start at 15, and small galleries at 5.

The level multiplies that. A year or a Grand Prix counts four times, a month or a gold twice, a day once, an honourable mention or kudos half. A nomination counts nothing: at some juries every paid entry becomes a nominee.

One piece of work often collects several levels from the same jury in the same week. It counts once at its best level, and each further level adds a fifth.

Awards age. Those from the last two years count in full, those from two to five years ago by half, older ones by a quarter. Reach describes a studio as it is now, not as it was in 2012.

One domain, one site

The same recount closed a gap in the other half of the number.

Domain Rating belongs to a domain. When a studio built fifty parish sites on the subdomains of one diocese, each subdomain brought the diocese's rating again, and one client became fifty works. From today a group of sites on one domain counts once: the domain itself if the studio built it, otherwise the strongest of the group. 367 credits across 126 studios were folded this way.

What moved

Studios that rarely sign their footers but collect awards were nearly invisible to a register that counts footers. Unit9 rose from #3,081 to #3, Monks from #6,636 to #4, Active Theory from #7,982 to #14. Studios whose reach rested on networks of subdomains moved the other way. 1,832 studios now have awards in their Reach.

The monthly snapshot of October stays as it was taken: those places are a record, not a draft. The new Reach goes into the snapshot of 1 November, and awards confirmed before then count in it.

The formula is written out in full on the Method page. If your studio has awards, add them in your account under Awards.