IDEA

And the gold medal winner of the 2004 Industrial Design Excellence Award (IDEA) for Digital Media & Interfaces is the Mohawk Paper Mills Website.

Print designers find a site that functions like paper intuitively easy to use.

Um, I’m not buying that. Strange comments like that one aside, I appreciate the smooth animation as squares descend and bounce into place as I interact with the site (flash version). The content is richer than what I expected to find. It’s not a bad site. However, I think one basic goal all award winning sites should acheive is attention to affordances, eg. making what’s clickable look clickable. Here text that’s plain text and text that’s linked are identical in appearance. It does what I believe Christina Wodtke described as “forcing the user to use braille” — running their mouse across the page watching for the hand to show up. Whatever the other criteria, if something meant for interaction can’t make how to interact with it very obvious, I wouldn’t consider it for an award.