Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot CSS Redesign Contest
I will pick the winner based on a series of arbitrary and random criteria, many of which I will list below. The list is by no means comprehensive, but it should give you a good starting point.
I'm sure there are ultimately things that I'm forgetting. But the key goal here is to create the new look & feel for Slashdot. The winner is the one who creates what gets us the closest to a new site design.
This contest will be highly subjective. Ultimately tho, it falls upon me to select the winner based on arbitrary and subjective factors like aesthetics, as well as more tangible ones like implementability and compatibility.
CRITERIAWhat follows is a brief list of criteria I will use to judge, as well as how to submit your entries. Remember that anything artistic I suggest is just that- a suggestion. If you hate green, go ahead and make a blue design. I'm just telling you what I'm looking for in a winning design... and while I am the judge, nothing is set in stone... like any good art student knows- you can do almost anything you want as long as you can rationalize it in your critique.
- Uses our existing CSS framework - We are willing to make minor changes to our underlying HTML if need be, but the ideal winner is implemented entirely by using custom images and CSS. Almost every element on Slashdot is appropriately classed or ID'd now, so you should be able to do it.
- Works compatibly on most browsers - IE, Firefox, Mozilla, and Safari represent the bulk of our traffic. Ideally a winning candidate works on these platforms, but also degrades nicely to the less popular browsers. We'll test winners against whatever we have access to. We're not expecting everyone's entry to work perfectly and identically on every platform that exists, but if your whole design hangs on CSS trickery that only works under 1 browser, you will lose!
- Retains all major bits of information - unless you can make a case for dropping something! Articles need bylines. You still need space for our ads. We still need a submenu to list out all the sections. If you want to trim down menus or something, we'll consider that, but most items on our pages need to be there for some reason. You'll need to rationalize dropping items from menus or removing parts of the UI that we need.
- Doesn't require us to add major new bits of data - There are a million great ideas for functions and features that could be added to Slashdot. This is not the place to propose them. This is about Look & Feel. This is not about telling us that we need voting on articles or tagging on polls. Those are valid feature suggestions that we would love to do one day. But this contest is about look & feel. Save feature requests for another time (and remember, patches are always welcome!)
- Topic Icons - So we have 150+ topic icons. Your design needs to incorporate our existing icons, and not require that we rebuild all of them. That means most likely that the icons sit on a white background. The icons themselves vary from around 50x100 to 100x50 but most float around 64x64. I'd strongly suggest that a winning entry is submitted using our existing topic icons as examples. let me say that again we have 150+ icons, and we can't rebuild them all. Your design should use our icons. Not new ones. That means sizes, and white backgrounds. This is the one rule that is pretty hard and fast. And no we're not switching to anti-aliased PNGs yet. Sorry.
- Entries ought not be bandwidth gluts. No hard/fast size limits here, but if your page requires 2 megs of jpegs to render, I'd suggest moving on.
- Retains some sense of visual continuity with Today's Slashdot - This one is the real challenge I think. From the Slashdot 'Shade of Green' (#006666) to the curve on the upper left hand corner of the page & article headers, to the use of the Coliseo font, I really think that many of these design elements need to persist. You are welcome to ignore me of course. But I'm being totally up front about this point: the winning entry ought to echo the current design. How loud of an echo is up to you.
- Entries should show as at least the index, but ideally a few other pages to see how their design might look showing other data formats. I really think Slashdot has 4 "major" pages: The Index, The Article, The Comments, and The User. I'm not saying you need to do all four, but the winning design needs to translate well to every data type on the site. The more guidance you give us, the more likely you are to win.
- I have to like it. Design something pretty. Design something high-tech. Design something minimal. Design something elaborate. I don't know what the winner will look like. I'm excited to see what you guys come up with.
I fully intend to critique good entries. The goal here is of course to get the best looking, bandwidth efficient, compatible, attractive Slashdot. If I think your design is ugly, I'll tell you. If I think it's close, I'll give you specific ideas. I'm the judge here, so this is totally unfair. But again, my goal here is not to be fair, it's to make Slashdot look awesome.
I'm going to give this 2 weeks, and then I'm going to share with you some of my favorites at that point in a story. I'll try to tell you all what I like about these designs. I'll ask at that time for your feedback. Then I'll give everyone one more week. The contest will continue to be open to anyone who wants. Everyone is welcome to refine their designs, or submit new ones right until the end.
Between now and then, I will try to post a few journal entries as I see good designs float through. I want this whole process to be as participative as possible.
At the end of this time, I will pick a winner. I will be biased. I will be unfair. I will pick the design that I think is the best for Slashdot based on the criteria I mention above as well as my own personal sense of aesthetics.
The winner will get a fancy laptop. We haven't picked the exact one yet, but it's going to be a good one- we're not cutting corners. You'll be able to choose from a MacBook Pro or else a bleeding edge Alienware laptop. We'll pick the specs when we pick a winner so you get whatever is supremely awesome, but valued up to US $4500. We'll also be offering a $250 runner up prize.
Lastly, our corporate lawyer tells us that you are required to read the official rules before you enter.
Good luck to everyone. Happy designing. Have fun... I can't wait to see what people come up with!
If Slashdot is ugly (and it is), why are so many of its "characteristic" elements supposed to be retained? One of the first things I'd do in a redesign is drop the #006666. And why not let users submit new icon packs? Once again, the icons currently in use are pretty horrendous, and yet the criterion is "Make it look pretty while still using our shitty gifs. So let's see: The redesign has to keep the same title font, the same top-left curve, and the same green; it must have white content areas, because it must incorporate the lovely set of circa 1999 icons. What exactly are you expecting?
The 'top selected URLs' you plan on using in two weeks... will you provide the webspace to host them. Because most of us have bandwidth expenses and fear the slashdot effect from the story...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
...don't just redecorate it.
Your confines are really tight, and don't really provide any room for the identity to grow. Considering your competition (digg) has a much stronger, cleaner design because they haven't had to be tied to a decade of old design rules, I would almost say that you'd be better off throwing some of the rules out.
I think if you really want to redesign the site, you need to be willing to try new approaches with the architecture -- redoing many of the icons, cleaning up what can be a glut of information, and giving the site a more modern style that suits 2006. Tebrand the site and get rid of the font; create a new logo.
I hate to put it this way, because it's so cliche, but think outside the box. Your parameters make the box really hard to move around in.
I'm betting the best designs you get are the ones that ignore your rules and regulations the most.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Instead of requiring someone to set something up elsewhere, it'd be nice if you could post your CSS to your user account and have it applied (much like on wikipedia). Slap in an option on the URL to viewing the page with someone else's style sheet. Bam. All your entries are in one place; no one has to worry about setting up hosting elsewhere; anyone can view anyone's entry (or throw a admin-only thing on it or something if you care); etc.
Only problem I see is that you can't do anything outside of what you can do with a style sheet. If someone's that serious then they shouldn't have a problem/lack-of-motivation of setting up hosting elsewhere.
Better still: make this permanent. If I don't like X or Y then I can tweak my own style sheet the way I want. But I suppose that'd lead to user's finding a way to display: none the adverts.
Oh well, one can dream I guess...
:wq
Taco's getting a great deal here.
And more power to him, but let me suggest he sweeten the deal a bit.
(I'm not suggesting this put of self-interest: I'm a programmer, not a graphics designer. And besides, I prefer the minimalist non-graphic Slashdot interface anyway.)
In addition to the laptop, give the winner a tiny link to his (or her) site on any Slashdot page using his design. On the bottom of each page, in a small font size, something like "Page design by Winner's Name/a>.
This costs Slashdot nothing, and gives the winner free advertising that lets him participate in his own success. He can link to a site that offers redesigns for as fee, or a blog that explains his design principles and gets him some ad revenue, or whatever.
For the non-winning submissions that become Slashdot's "work for hire" property, at least put up a gallery of those designs, hosted by Slashdot and linking to the submitters' sites, so that Slashdot's readers can check them out and give the non-winners some business or at least page views.
And Slashdot should relax the work for hire provisions of the legal contest rules; I understand that Slashdot wants to be unhindered in its use of submitted designs and careful not to open itself to any law suits, but maybe Slashdot could provide an more Open Source example than requiring that all submissions, even the non winning ones, "transfer and convey, to Sponsor any and all your intellectual property rights in the Design".
Again, more power to Taco and Slashdot. Taco's leveraged Slashdot's visibility to get some serious work done for free. Just use that leverage to reward the contest submitters too.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
These are standard "identity redesign" constraints. When Pepsi or Burger King or AT&T or DC Comics redesigns their corporate identity package, they ask for something that has some continuity with the old one. Same here.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Three replies thus far, all of them basically pouncing on a very minor part of my post.
95% of my post wasn't about Digg. It was about Slashdot. Digg and Slashdot are two different sites that mine a similar market.
I wasn't basing my point around Digg. I was merely exemplifying it. I know a lot of people around here don't like Digg, just as a lot of people here don't like Slashdot. But really, I think both sites could learn something from the other.
The truth is, though, Slashdot has ten layers of old structure that it should peel away and clean up, and that'd be true whether or not Digg existed.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Collaborate to de-GIF the Slashdot icons for the benefit of all.
Anyway, let's get to that point: Changing a CSS file is not a "redesign". Saying so is just fooling yourself.
Don't tell the folks at csszengarden.com.