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A few years ago we won a Webby for our work on the redesign and rebuild of the ABA Journal website. Since then, the ABA Journal has been nominated or honored by the Webby's 3 more times, including this year!

Today we won another Webby Award. This time we won for our partnership with IDEO on the The Future of Automobility site. This site was honored in the Best User Interface category and won the Webby for the Car Sites & Car Culture category.

Solspace is excited to receive this honor, but more so we are humbled by it. Modern web development projects are team efforts. Such an endeavor requires a continuum of hard work and creative collaboration from designers, strategists, and sys admins; coders, Javascripters, optimizers and code library developers (and this list goes on and on). The team aspect of our work cannot be overemphasized. And while each Webby Award belongs to many contributors and collaborators, I’d like to take this opportunity to toot someone's horn in particular...

Chris Ruzin joined the Solspace team early on. Solspace has yet to give Chris a challenge he could not conquer. When I assigned him to the Automobility project, I knew that I was asking him to find answers for some difficult and highly technical demands. What our client, IDEO, wanted to achieve was cutting edge. Developers had used HTML and Javascript to create highly interactive web apps, but few if any had done so while incorporating this quantity of data and this number of hi-rez rendered images. The scope and manner of user interaction also exceeded that of previous projects. Chris jumped in and was up and running at full speed in very short order. As always, when faced with onerous technical challenges, he rallied and offered up creative and elegant solutions. So, I want to thank the team, but in particular, I want to thank Chris. His contribution to the team creation of the Future of Automobility site was invaluable.

When IDEO approached Solspace to build out their Future of Automobility site they had already successfully launched a similar highly interactive site for the San Francisco Unified School District. Through these microsites, IDEO creates space to showcase not only their design process, but also their forward thinking around a specific industry or market segment. With Automobility, IDEO is able to immerse site visitors in the IDEO point of view on the future of the automotive industry. Our mandate was to create a platform where IDEO could communicate their vision and do so in a manner that extolled their commitment to excellence in design and execution. To do so, we had to find a way to write code and design with performance and execution at the forefront. IDEO presented us with an exquisite design and a gracefully elegant user interface concept. The challenge then was to pull off the complexity behind the scenes while presenting visitors with an interface that was sleek and flowing.

We are very pleased to see that the fruits of our labor have captured another Webby. We thank IDEO for the continued opportunity to work with them and their teams.