Putting some soul into tech: The Tiny Awards finalists reveal the weird, wonderful and political side of the internet

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.

Fifty Thousand Names

The winning site of the Tiny awards 2025 is Fifty Thousand Names, a site that seeks to visualise one horrifying statistic: As of March 2025 over 50,000 people have been killed in Gaza. Upon entry the homepage reads: ‘Every number is a person and every person is a name’. As the guiding principle for the project, the website seeks to hardcode messages of grief for each martyr killed by Israeli forces since October 2023.

The poignant and heart wrenching infographic was created by developer Leo Scarin and is “the first political site that’s been shortlisted for Tiny Awards”, Kristoffer tells us, “The site itself is similar to scraping websites created by artists such as Chia Amisola (Ang Bantayog) and Sam Lavigne (e.g., Get Well Soon, Coppelgänger, New York Apartment), where a large dataset is made intimate through the browser.” Making it to the top this year, this protest project made the founders ponder: “Could websites become a sphere for activism again?"

Speaking to the recognition from this years awards, Leo shares: “This is a project I care deeply about and I’m happy to see someone else does too. Especially the Tiny Awards community. It is open, caring, inspiring, and it understands what building the web is about: autonomy and interdependence. Tiny is political. Tiny is revolutionary."

“I Feel So Much Shame”

One of the finalists this year was the site “I Feel So Much Shame”, a browser-based interactive poem and narrative made entirely from scanned Risograph prints, designed by Jackie Liu. A beautifully analogue expression of the artist’s inner world, the site is a meditation on shame and desire through interactive and animated buttons. The site was put together as part of a digital residency with Welcome To My Home Page that Jackie participated in last year.

Internet Road Trip

Also making it into the final lineup was Internet Road Trip. Made by creator Neal.Fun, this is a site that facilitates a collaborative cross country drive using Google Street view. Live and moving at all times, the site is set up like a game where you can check in at any hour to see which direction people have voted to turn the car next. There’s also a live chat which is quite hilariously full of people negotiating what direction everyone should put their vote to. Last time I checked, the car was speeding through Maine.

Traffic Cam Photobooth

A project by artist writer and developer Morry Kolman, Traffic Cam Photobooth is a website that allows anybody to ‘locate their nearest publicly available traffic camera and use it to take pictures of themselves’. Another finalist and not the usual self portrait set up, this hack of a public surveillance system is a statement on the constant policing of our lives in cities, where we are captured by cameras like these several times a day without knowing. This tool allows us to take back control of them by creating our own self-portrait. If you’re visiting it’s best to use this tool on your phone when you’re out and about, as Morry states on the site’s homepage: ‘I do not want you to bring your laptop into traffic.’

Consumed Today

A hilarious and highly detailed inventory of what creator Shen takes in everyday, Consumed Today is another highlight from the 2025 final lineup. At first glance you might think that the site only features food, detailed in cut out style photos. But while the creative has listed meal and snack under the ‘physical’ category for each date, they’ve also given us an insight into what they are looking at, reading and listening to in an ‘audio’ ‘text’ and ‘visual’ drop down. A fascinating set up that goes all the way back to June 2024 this intimate diary satisfies the nosey in all of us. If you click around you’ll get some very interesting digestive sounds.

Reflecting on this year’s submissions, Klein sees the 2025 awards as “permission and a reminder that we can just make things, but also that the creative web acts as social commentary“. He continues: “I sensed an earnest theme in the nominees this year. Sites like Fifty Thousand Names, Feel So Much Shame, Consumed Today and Traffic Cam Booth, to me, commented on the zeitgeist so eloquently. The tiny web is inherently creative, but creativity doesn’t mean unserious.”

Building on the roster of thoughtful and boundary-pushing projects from previous years, the nominees for 2025 didn’t simply “demonstrate creative or technical prowess”, he ends “but used the internet to process collective trauma, express complex emotion and celebrate human connection. This year’s Tiny Awards reflect a creative web community increasingly conscious of its role in cultural discourse, using constraints as a canvas for weighty commentary. Nothing tiny about that.”