Slashdot Mirror

It's the result of the competition for a new skin that we had a bit ago. See cmdrtaco's journal.

Frankly, I didn't think this was the best of the final 3 (to me, there was clearly a nicer skin).

What I'm really waiting for, is our new-found CSS capabilities used to allow user-selectable stylesheets. It can't be too hard; after all, they hacked the stylesheet for April 1 (when it went all pink).

It's barely a change at all. Some of the entrants were really innovative, cleaning up a lot of junk and providing a very immediate interface. When you compare to entries like these, you wonder why they bothered.

http://skazani.pl/lukasz/projekty/slashdot/
http://insitemotion.com/slashdot2/

(no, I didn't enter either)

So, this guy's the winner because his design most closely resembles the current Slashdot design?
What part of RE-Design am I missing here?
I thought a competition for a RE-design actually meant making a new design, that may or may not be based on the old one.
The winning design is basically the same old design, with slightly spiffier graphics and collapsable blocks. That's it... hardly a re-design. More like putting shoe-shine on your worn-out sandals and calling them new shoes.

I for one am very disappointed in this choice, given the quality of the other finalists.
Personally I would have wanted Michael Johnson's design.

http://insitemotion.com/slashdot2/
Michael Johnson's entry..

I found this in Alex Bendiken's blog... If this has already been shared, my apologies...

Kris

...you should probably know that the Dynamic Ribbon Device is one of the founding trademarks that the Coca-Cola company holds and they're probably not about to let you lot use it. Try to come up with your own ideas Michael Johnson.

I do like this one a lot though. It's clean, balanced and is very elegantly shaded.

These are nice, even sexy, designs. My one complant is that these designs, and the current Slashdot design, try to use divs as tables, even when it doesn't fit. Tables are still part of HTML 4.01; they have not been depreceated. I don't believe it's cool to try to force divs to act as tables, when tables would fit much better. It seems they are going to have problems with the footer floating up over one of the three cols... and the cols restrict the body from filling up the whole page when you get below the cols.

If I would add any one thing to slashdot, it would be the ability for the body to expand past the cols, when the cols don't have anything in it. When you scroll down a ways, 40% of the screen is whitespace, which has to be bad design, though you might think it's cool because you only use divs. For an example of what I'm talking about, check this site. Now, it won't validate, because it's displaying the full feeds of people who don't know how to write html, but it could look the same in xhtml 1.0 strict.

Now, Slashdot is better than some sites, where they can have up to 70% whitespace if you have a larger monitor. This site is aweful. The body of the messages don't expand with the browser window, and the politics and retoric suck.

The top of this one looks great.

I like the post in the body of this one...

Anyway, that's my two cents. Take it for what it's worth.

I found one really big issue with Michael Johnson's design: the site requires JavaScript to be enabled for the site to display properly. This means it will not work properly with most software for the visually impaired or for paranoid geeks like me that browse the web with JavaScript turned off.

Often, if I go to a site that requires JavaScript to view it, I simply move on.

I have to agreed to http://insitemotion.com/slashdot2/ having the footer displaying halfway through the page. A simple correction in CSS will fix this. As for people talking about larger fonts: Show me one site(that isn't plain text) that has any amount of design to it that doesn't blow out after zooming more than 3 or 4 times. I vote for http://slashdot.bestweddingsource.com/

They all have their strong points, but Michael Johnson's design currently has some weirdness going on in Firefox 1.5.0.3 with the page footer showing up halfway thorugh the page at the tail of the right side boxes. Little weird in IE6 as well. Other than that, they look good.