Since its start in 2023, where its first web awardee was crowned (Lauren Walker’s impeccable Rotating Sandwiches site) the Tiny Awards has been celebrating the “small, poetic, creative, and handmade” side of the internet – URL-based web experiences that sit outside the commercial realm, made by independent creatives. The sites entered into the Tiny Awards are creative projects that, as co-founder Matt Muir puts it, act as signs of our “humanity, in all of its visceral, stupid ugly beauty”, and are almost certainly “a refreshing attribute amidst our current tech discourse”, co-founder Matt Klein adds.
Based on the idea that the internet is, (despite the current landscape), “more than just social media, more than just vertical video, and that, at heart, it‘s a creative medium of infinite possibility”, the Tiny Awards were Kristoffer’s idea to celebrate hand-made projects in the hope to bring back the “funnier and weirder” side of the web. “We started Tiny Awards back in 2023 to call attention to all the lovely things still being published online,” he says. While existing awards like The Webby Awards, might platform projects with big brands and budgets behind them, “the tiny remains too overlooked”, shares Klein. “Arguably, it’s typically these solo, bootstrapped, handmade passion projects that are more deserving of the recognition here.”
This year, the awards have received hundreds of nominations from alternative corners of the web, made by creatives around the world. After a jury panel of 18 leading artists and thinkers narrowed down the list to their top 11, public decision making began and over a thousand votes later, this year’s winner of the web was crowned. Below, we find out more about the winning site and some of the creative ideas behind the final lineup for 2025.