We won the Best Website award for the KIT Royal Tropical Institute redesign!

The new website for KIT Royal Tropical Institute has won the award for ’Best Site’ at the Automattic Design Awards. This weekend at WordCamp US, the finalists and winners of this award were announced by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.

This is what the jury says about it:

If a first impression counts, KIT is already a winner. The vibrant colours and overall appearance of the site are very pleasing to the eye. Besides that, the small team […] did a tremendous job incorporating 7 sites into one, without losing the top tasks of the target audience out of sight. All designed and developed in Gutenberg, having inclusive design incorporated in every step, the jury was unanimous about this being the winner in the category best site.

Of course winning an award is nice, but it’s mind-blowing when people whose work I admired for years, like Khoi Vinh, Jeffrey Zeldman and Kat Holmes, are in the jury along with people from Automattic, Shopify and InVision and they unanimously agree that your work is the best they've seen 🤯

It's not often that you see a design award appreciate and underscore the importance of accessibility, so it’s great that our effort into making sure the website works for as many people as possible is noticed.

Of course I’d also like to congratulate winners in the Best Style category, our fellow Dutchies at Level Level.

I’m very proud of our work, and since this is very much a team effort, major credits and thanks go out to Luc Princen, Stephan Csikós and of course to Debby de Vries, Reuben Fourt-Wells, Alexander van der Mijhe and the other people at KIT Royal Tropical Institute we had the pleasure of working with.