W3Haus UK Labs

Interview with Rob Ford from the FWA awards!

We recently caught up with Rob Ford, creator of the FWA Awards (Favourite Website Awards). He was kind enough to give us an interview. We check the site regularly for inspiration in cutting edge design work on the web and are always surprised by the high quality work featured daily.


1) What is your professional background and what inspired you to create the FWA?

Well, I have a chequered past and when I look back I can see why I have ended up where I am now today. I left school after getting poor results in my exams and ended up working at a bank. From there I had a number of different jobs including working for American Express and Vauxhall. Whilst I was in my twenties I did a range of very random jobs to pay for a different outlook on life I had at that time… mainly having fun. J In my late twenties I found the web and started to have some fun with HTML and then Flash. Started my own agency, won some awards, got nominated for a big award in the UK and realised the natural high of awards was something I loved and, from there, went on to set up FWA in May of 2000. Making people feel good, legally, is something wonderful. Sending people an official winner email from FWA is something I never tire of.


2) Prizes and awards sometimes become benchmarks for quality and innovation. After the demise of the Shockwave Site of the Day award (SSOD), the FWA became (in our view) the most prestigious award for flash based websites. Do you believe your award is, by highlighting some types of work and not others, influencing how sites are built and what designers aspire to create?

FWA was always set up to focus on the future of the web and that has just happened to be Flash. At the moment we are hearing a lot of talk about the demise of Flash and that the future is HTML 5 and Web 33.33 recurring etc but I have still yet to see one single website that doesn’t use Flash in some shape or form that can show me a different way forward. And when I say “way forward” I mean in a pioneering way… something that was like when Flash came out and we felt that the web had just gone colour from black and white, much like televisions did. In my opinion the web is still at the stage when cars used to be cranked at the front to start. We have such a long long way to go before we know where we are going with this. There was a day when all cars were black and that is what HTML, CSS etc is doing now. I am as ready as the next person to see the next big thing so send me links if you have them! Sites like twitter are very clever and great ideas but they are not pushing technology, just ideas.

3) What would happen to the FWA if Adobe flash lost it’s dominance in web rich media applications? Would you change the name to something like SilverLight Website Awards – The SWA awards? Do you think flash will always be at the forefront for cutting edge design work?

An even better question would be, what would happen if FWA stopped showcasing Flash websites? Would Adobe suffer as a result?! As FWA stands for “Favourite” Website Awards and not “Flash”, there is nothing stopping us from awarding any site we like. We have no criteria that says sites must be built with Flash. In fact, I look forward to the day when we do get to feature sites made with other technologies. There have been a few in the past with the likes of unity3D and even a couple of HTML sites but I am ready and poised for the chance to showcase sites other than Flash, as soon as we start seeing some that are worthy. I’m actually talking to the Silverlight team right now as I am trying to not miss any impressive SL work. It’s just a matter of time, I’m sure.

4) We’ve seen that you are now involved in other projects such as co-authoring the book Guidelines for Online Success published by Taschen, creating the FWA One Photo a day – what does the future hold for FWA?

FWA has mass potential. An audience on thefwa.com alone, each month of over 2 million site visits and over 400 thousand unique users from almost every country on the planet. There are so many possibilities for new showcases and other ways of working with our users. My biggest regret at the moment is not being able to give our users a voice but I’m sure that time will come. The one thing that has always held FWA back is resources… financial, business and human resources. With those type of resources, there are so many ideas I have that could be realised.

5) The FWA awards are quite well known in Brazil with a few winners from the country featured in the archives. What do you think of the submissions that come from Brazil and do you see any characteristics that are peculiar to the work coming from the country?

FWA loves Brazil. J We have 53 winning sites from Brazil so we are very impressed by Brazilian talent. Companies like Gringo, Colmeia, Almap BBDO and Seagulls Fly always get us excited when a submission comes in from any of them. I wouldn’t say that there was a particular style as I do believe we have an international playing field now… one massive melting pot of ideas, if you like.

Rob’s FWA office setup!