Brought to you by net magazine and Creative Bloq, the net awards is an annual event now in its 16th year that recognises the very best work in the world of web design.
There are 20 categories this year and the winners will be revealed at a lavish ceremony at the Grand Connaught Rooms after Generate London on 18 September.
The shortlist for each category consists of five candidates whittled down by public voting from a longlist of 10. The longlist was compiled by the net editorial team, based on the 1,725 nominations we received from you.
As ever, what follows is a list of truly inspiring people and projects that have really brought the web forward this year.
Here's the shortlist.
New agency of the year
UENO
Ueno is a full-service digital agency with offices in San Francisco and Iceland. Clients include Airbnb, Medium, Cisco, Lonely Planet, Google, Reuters, Fitbit and Dropbox.
No Divide
No Divide was founded by Dan Edwards and Ryan Taylor in late 2014. They've worked with clients including Five Simple Steps, Motion Array, Herself and launched the popular resource oozled.com.
Hactar
Hactar is a product and service design agency who specialises in helping organisations with a social conscience. Clever use of technology and lean processes enable them to work faster and smarter.
Anton & Irene
After seven years of working together, Anton and Irene recently started their own eponymous design studio that focuses on creating highly engaging interactive experiences.
Mono
Mono is an interface design company that helps shape the experience of digital products.
Team of the year
Booking.com front-end team
The front-end team striving to build the best travel experience for millions of users all around the world.
The jQuery team
The jQuery Project is run by a distributed group of volunteers that all want to see jQuery become the best JavaScript tool possible.
InVision design
The design team behind InVision, a prototyping, collaboration, and workflow platform.
BBC responsive news team
Getting a responsive, internationalised project through a bureaucratic organisation like the BBC can't be easy. This team did it. Not only that, they shared their findings, leaving the community with valuable techniques such as 'cutting the mustard'. Also see responsivenews.co.uk, where BBC News developers blog about responsive design.
Vox Media product team
The Vox Media product team help make SB Nation, The Verge, Polygon, Curbed, Eater, Racked, and Vox.com.
Agency of the year
Huge
Huge is a global collective of designers, strategists and technologists known for setting new standards in product, service, and experience design for brands including HBO, Nike, FX, Google, and Eurosport.
Filament Group
Filament Group helps companies design and build super-fast responsive sites and web apps that are simple to use and accessible to everyone. Projects include BostonGlobe.com, mobile shop.LEGO.com, Rent.com, and jQuery Mobile.
Dogstudio
Dogstudio is a multi award-winning and quality-driven digital agency from Belgium. They are designers, developers, toy benders, music fanatics, party harders, moms, dads, freaks and nerds.
ZURB
ZURB is a close-knit team of product designers who've been helping companies like Samsung, Intuit, Walmart, Yahoo!, and Netflix design better websites, services and online products since 1998.
SFCD
SFCD is a New York based digital agency that creates beautiful mobile apps and websites for leading companies. They have worked with ADP, T-Mobile, Sony, Samsung, Path, and Speedtest.net among others.
Emerging talent of the year
Adam Marsden
Adam Marsden is a web designer and front-end developer based in South Yorkshire, UK. He's known for creating a simple SASS framework, Crumpet, and a popular minimal Google Chrome theme.
Jordan Obi
Jordan Obi is a 21-year-old product designer at Jukely in NYC. He's passionate about civil rights, emotional design, and the intersection of music and technology.
Arthur Verschaeve
At just 14 years of age Arthur Verschaeve looks set to be an open source hero. He's been made a team member at H5BP, jQuery, Yeoman and TodoMVC and works on a range of other projects as well.
Wenting Zhang
Wenting Zhang is a UX designer, front-end developer, Sketch-lover, colour geek, type nerd, pixel pusher, wannabe hardcore coder and author of underline.js. She is currently a UX designer at Viacom.
Tiffany Rayside
Tiffany Rayside is known for her outstanding contribution to the CodePen community. She creates interesting, beautiful work using lots of different technologies and has an inspiring community spirit.
Young developer of the year
Graham Campbell
Graham is a prolific PHP coder and has contributed to hundreds of repositories. He is the creator of coding style service StyleCl, and the second biggest Laravel contributor after Taylor Otwell.
Julien Renau
Julien Renau is a creative developer at AKQA Shanghai and an Awwwards jury member. He loves collaborating with designers and has won numerous awards for his beautifully animated websites.
Julia Wallin
Julia Wallin has spent the past year working on major projects for NASA, Google, and Guggenheim. At only 22-years-old, she has quickly become a solid developer with strong motion skills.
Lucas Bebber
Described by Chris Coyier as "the originator of some of the most creative effects I've ever seen on the web", Lucas Bebber is a developer and illustrator with one of the most interesting CodePen profiles on the site.
Young designer of the year
Amy Schwartz
Amy Nicole Schwartz is the lead designer at Cards Against Humanity; the founder of design initiative Liminal Space; an adjunct faculty member at DePaul University and a regular speaker at conferences and universities.
Una Kravets
Una Kravets is a front end developer who architects design systems and builds software prototypes at IBM Design, Austin. She's a core member of Design Open and founder of the Sassy DC and ATX Sass Meetups.
Riza Selcuk Saydam
Riza Selcuk Saydam is currently a student at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science in Çankaya University. He works as a UX Designer at Nokta and will join Facebook Design later this year.
Alice Lee
Alice was an early Dropbox designer who played a key role in building the Carousel, Mailbox, and Dropbox brand experiences. Now independent, she's illustrated for the NYTimes, Google, Sequoia Capital, Pinterest, etc.
Tushar Merwanji
Tushar Merwanji is a UX and UI designer who has worked on projects for Jaguar, Land Rover, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer. He has also built an iOS application in Objective-C for Alzheimer's patients.
Developer of the year
Scott Jehl
Scott Jehl works alongside the bright folks at Filament Group building websites and applications for clients such as the Boston Globe, LEGO, Global News, eBay, and more. In 2014 he wrote Responsible Responsive Design.
Bastian Allgeier
Bastian Allgeier is a designer and developer, the creator of Zootool and Kirby and the co-organiser of Decentralise Camp.
Andrew Nacin
Andrew Nacin is a lead developer of the WordPress web publishing platform, living in Washington, DC, and currently works at the US Digital Service at the White House.
Hugo Giraudel
Hugo Giraudel is a front-end developer at Edenspiekermann, in Berlin. He's a maintainer of SassDoc, writer of Sass Guidelines, curator of Sass-Compatibility, maker of Browserhacks and author of a lot of Sass material.
Sara Soueidan
Sara Soueidan is a freelance front-end web developer, writer and speaker focusing on HTML5, SVG, CSS, and JavaScript. She's the author of the Codrops CSS Reference, and a co-author of the Smashing Book #5.
Web designer of the year
Heydon Pickering
Heydon Pickering is an interface designer, illustrator and writer from the UK. Heydon is the web accessibility (#a11y) editor for Smashing Magazine and lead designer at Neontribe.
Meg Lewis
Meg Lewis is the founder of Ghostly Ferns and works with happy companies to execute thoughtful brand strategy and friendly design across various platforms. Meg never takes herself too seriously.
Tobias van Schneider
Tobias van Schneider is a award-winning German designer, raised in Austria and currently living in New York City. He is building new products as Art Director and Lead Product Designer with Spotify USA.
Karolina Szczur
Karolina is a lead designer and developer at &yet. She’s also an Open Source aficionado and a feminist. She runs CSS Conf in Oakland, California and co-organises JSConf EU.
Yesenia Perez-Cruz
Yesenia is a designer based out of Philadelphia, PA. Yesenia currently works at Intuitive Company, where her role spans design strategy, user experience, and graphic design. Previously, she was a senior designer at Happy Cog in Philadelphia.
Outstanding contribution
Bruce Lawson
Web standards lovegod, co-author of Introducing HTML5, originator of the <picture> element, open web standards evangelist for Opera.
Tina Roth Eisenberg
Tina Roth Eisenberg is the instigator of the creative co-working space Studiomates, the design blog Swissmiss and the breakfast lecture series Creative Mornings.
Jeremy Keith
Jeremy Keith founded Clearleft with Andy Budd and Richard Rutter in 2005, and now guides the company’s technical direction. He also curates dConstruct and is a respected speaker and writer.
Sara Soueidan
Sara Soueidan has taken the web world by storm this year with her prolific writing and speaking, mostly on CSS and SVG. She is the author of the Codrops CSS Reference and a co-author of the Smashing Book #5.
Molly Holzschlag
Molly E. Holzschlag has changed the world in many ways. She is the author of over 30 books on web design, CSS, accessibility, web standards, and has helped to establish many of the web standards used today.
Podcast of the year
The Web Ahead
Jen Simmons speaks with world experts on changing technologies and the future of the web.
The Design Details Podcast
A weekly show about the people who design our favorite products, hosted by Bryn Jackson and Brian Lovin.
Responsive Design Podcast
A podcast by Justin Avery that interviews some of the best names in the business about their experiences of responsive web design.
Developer Tea
Developer Tea is the 10 minute podcast for developers. It's engineered to be a highly-concentrated, short, frequent podcast specifically for developers who like to learn on their tea (and coffee) break.
Conference talk of the year
Lena Reinhard: A talk about nothing
Lena Reinhard takes a look behind the curtains of reality and explore some of the underlying rules that shape our existence.
Darius Kazemi: Tiny subversions
Darius Kazemi delivers a parodic send-up of every talk ever given by a successful creative person, then offers a few pieces of advice from his own experience as a lottery winner.
Leonie Watson: Design like you give a damn
Léonie Watson passionately and creatively expresses practical advice on accessibility for web professionals.
Gavin Strange: Craft, graft and being daft
Gavin Strange on how he has bludgeoned his way through his career using the sledgehammer of excitement, smashing down the walls of knowledge with the brute force of bright colours and childlike enthusiasm.
Chris Coyier: SVG is for everybody
While SVG isn't exactly new, browser support is just getting to the point that we can use it without much worry. This makes now the perfect time to learn about SVG and how it can help you in everyday web design.
Grassroots event of the year
Dribbble Meetups
Dribbble Meetups are a chance for designers to socialize, talk shop, and foster their local design communities.
Ladies that UX
A friendly, welcoming and collaborative community, with a growing number of local groups based in cities worldwide.
Codepen Meetups
Good for the soul — for like-minded <code> people. Events take place globally.
PubHack
PubHack is a 10-hour digital hackathon based in the pub.
Codebar
Codebar is a non-profit initiative that facilitates the growth of a diverse tech community by running regular programming workshops.
Best online portfolio
Cihad Turhan
Cihad Turhan is a creative front-end developer living in Ankara. He graduated in Physics and is now a Master's degree student in Game Technologies. He loves interactive, experimental technologies, data visualisation and red pandas.
Robin Ait-el-alim Noguier
Robin Ait-el-alim Noguier is a 21-year-old, Paris-based designer. He's currently studying at HETIC, a French web school. Robin likes to resolve design problems, create smart user interfaces and imagine useful interactions.
Vito Salvatore
Vito Salvatore is an Italian digital designer and art director. With over 10 years industry experience, Vito has created award winning projects for brands including Land Rover, Nike, British Airways, Valentino and Zegna.
Bethany Heck
Bethany Heck is the creative lead for Microsoft Power BI and the creator of the Eephus League. Her work spans printing techniques to responsive web and mobile app work.
Erin Nolan
Erin is a product designer helping companies better connect with their audience through storytelling and design. Her clients include The New York Times, FreshDirect, Quirky, Twitter, and more.
Side project of the year
What does my site cost?
Much of the world is accessing your site via mobile with an expensive data package. This site works out what your site costs to download via the mobile network in different countries. Created by Tim Kadlec.
Detroit Water Project
Detroit Water Project matches donors across the globe with Detroit residents without running water in their homes. It was created by Kristy Tillman and Tiffany Bell.
Species in Pieces
Species in Pieces is a CSS-based interactive exhibition celebrating evolutionary distinction created by Bryan James.
Underline.js
Create whimsical, twangable underlines with this tool by Wenting Zhang. The web has been without this for far too long.
If the moon were only 1 pixel
This interactive demo gives you an idea of the scale of the solar system - each pixel represents an area the size of the moon. Created by Josh Worth.
Best collaborative project
My Big Tomorrow
My Big Tomorrow is a resource designed to help young Australians realise bigger life choices.
Responsive Images Community Group
RICG is a group of developers working towards a client-side solution for delivering alternate image data based on device capabilities to prevent wasted bandwidth and optimize display for both screen and print.
AngularJS
AngularJS lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application. The resulting environment is extraordinarily expressive, readable, and quick to develop.
The Secret Handshake
The Secret Handshake is a resource for student designers and young creatives looking for insider insight, honest answers and solid solutions to go pro.
Mozilla Developer Network
The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) provides information about Open Web technologies including HTML, CSS, and APIs for both Web sites and HTML5 Apps.
Redesign of the year
Fontshop.com
Edenspiekermann unveiled the new design before it was finished in order to incorporate the input of the site's users.
TheGuardian.com
A full responsive redesign executed by the in house team.
BFI Player
A new player for the British Film Institute by Ostmodern.
Rush.com
A new website in honor of forty years of Rush by Plank and Happy Cog.
Airbnb.com
This year the in-house team redesigned the entire Airbnb experience to better reflect the people who make up their community.
Game changer of the year
Sketch
Sketch gives you the power, flexibility and speed you always wanted in a lightweight and easy-to-use package. Finally you can focus on what you do best: design.
Slack
Slack is a platform for team communication: everything in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go.
NPM
The package manager for JavaScript. It works great with Bower, Grunt, Browserify, Gulp, LESS and all your other favourites.
Material Design
A visual language for that synthesises the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science.
ReactJS
A JavaScript library for building user interfaces. React abstracts away the DOM from you, giving a simpler programming model and better performance.
Best new web technology
CSS Grid Layout
A two-dimensional grid-based layout system, optimised for user interface design. The children of a grid container can be positioned into arbitrary slots in a flexible or fixed predefined layout grid.
Service Worker
Service Workers provide event-driven scripts that run independently of web pages.
ES6
Exciting new features for making our lives easier.
Responsive Images
Preventing wasted bandwidth and optimising display.
CSS Variables
Cascading variables as a new primitive value type that is accepted by all CSS properties.
Open source project of the year
Atom
A hackable text editor for the 21st Century.
Meteor
Meteor is a complete open source platform for building web and mobile apps in pure JavaScript.
Gulp
Automate and enhance your workflow.
Foundation
The most advanced responsive front-end framework in the world.
BrowserSync
BrowserSync makes your tweaking and testing faster by synchronising file changes and interactions across multiple devices. It's wicked-fast and totally free.
App of the year
Blocs
Focused on simplicity, Blocs for Mac brings a fresh new approach to building modern, quality, static websites without the need to understand or write code.
Sketch
Sketch gives you the power, flexibility and speed you always wanted in a lightweight and easy-to-use package. Finally you can focus on what you do best: design.
Codepen
Front-end developer playground and code editor with a vibrant community. A place to showcase your work and explore advanced techniques with editable source code.
Affinity Designer
Affinity Designer is the fastest, smoothest, most precise vector graphic design software available.
InVision
The world's leading prototyping, collaboration and workflow platform.
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