McFarlane Prize for 2008 launches

McFarlane Prize for 2008 launches

• In: Blog
• By: maxine
• July 10th, 2008

Nominations are now open for the McFarlane Prize for Excellence in Australian Web Design for 2008.

Now in its third year, the prize recognizes and encourages excellence in web design by Australian web professionals. We’re really proud of having created and nurtured the prize - it’s been extremely rewarding over the years to hear feedback regarding how it has helped people motivate their organisations to create beautifully designed sites with attention paid to usability, web standards and accessibility. The best of the web.

Each year so far has seen increasingly stiff competition, and examples of genuinely great design and implementation in the winning sites: Museum Victoria’s Caught and Coloured in 2006 and Michael Koukoullis’ Andrews Must Resign last year in 2007.

Judging

The thing that we believe sets this prize apart from other industry awards is the judging process. Asking judges to adjudicate on scores of sites over the whole gamut of web expertise - from web standards to accessibility, visual design to usability and so on - simply doesn’t take advantage of that area of specialised expertise which is the reason you asked them to be a judge in the first place. To put it bluntly, it diminishes all of us. But what to do as an alternative?

For the first two years we have used the fact that there is machine testing for accessibility and adherence to web standards to create a simple first round of judging. We then passed on the remaining 20 or 30 sites to our judges to rank individually in their area of expertise.

• Accessibility - Andrew Arch (2006) and Gian Wild (2007)
• Usability - Lisa Herrod (2006) and Donna Maurer (2007)
• Design - Pete Ottery (2006) and Andy Coffey (2007)
• Coding - Dean Jackson (2006) and Dmitry Baranovskiy (2007)

But what became apparent last year was that this process was privileging web standards and accessibility over design and usability and that as time went on the issue was going to arise of some truly excellent sites being knocked out unfairly in that first round because of our very high standards there. So, this year we are relaxing on web standards and accessibility just a little in that first round, but at the same time introducing an aspect of assessing on visual design at this stage as well.

Nominating

You can nominate yourself, or anyone else, by going here. The prize is open to any Australian designer or team for a site launched or significantly upgraded between August 1 2007 and August 31 2008. You need to get that nomination in by August 31 as well.

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