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 $250 runner up prize.
Lastly, our corporate lawyer tells us that you are required to read the official rules before you enter.
Good luck to everyone. Happy designing. Have fun... I can't wait to see what people come up with!
If multiple entries prove to be good, especially for different targets (e.g., Light HTML, Mobile Presentation, etc) then it should be trivial to implement having multiple stylesheets the user can select, either via the browser's stylesheet selector, or in the user preferences.
However I quite liked the OMG Ponies design...
I don't think that you find people complaining about how /. looks, you find them complaining about:
/. effect (Option of nyud.net:8080 in the original links).
1) Slashvertisements
2) Duplicate, triplicates et cetera
3) Spelling errors.
4) No mechanisms to protect the
and so on...
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
Remeber this story?
I'm actually looking forward to this "American Idol" evaluation of the CSS submissions. Goot luck to the entrants.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
We don't have the source material and time to rebuild 153 icons.
Um, what does rebuild mean, anyway? Just plain redraw of the icons? Can't I use my own icons if I create all of them by myself, thus requiring you /. people to do nothing about them?
As long as they stop the browser from jumping to the end of the bloody page every other time when I try to highlight text.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
And the fact that this flamebait got modded up is another reason I like Digg's system better. Moderation is in the hands of all users there, not the select few. Diggers dont' have to put up with seeing flamebait and trolls get modded up while they helplessly watch and just hope some meta-mod will take care of it.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Is javascript using some of the more well known frameworks/scripts (ie: dojo or prototype) allowed?
Anecdotally, I've heard the Slashdot effect isn't nearly what it used to be. And the statistics are there to support this claim. The rate of commenting sitewide (including journals, polls, and user-created sids) is down over 25% from its peak in 2004-2005. This is publicly verifiable knowledge; just dig around in old stories and note the comment IDs.
Posting anonymously, with no cookies, from a foreign proxy, with an alternate browser, so as not to get "bitchslapped" down by the editors.
That way, I could go to my prefs, set my CSS to be http://www.example.com/my.css, and then slash would send meas the last stylesheet of any page served to me.
www.eFax.com are spammers
...let me suggest he sweeten the deal a bit...
/. ID that was no longer being used and put that in the prize package...
In addition to the laptop, give the winner a tiny link to his (or her) site on any Slashdot page using his design.
Meh. Now, if the Great Taco went and hunted down a 3-digit
Honestly, I think some of those icons need to be retired. Specifically things like VA, Turbolinux, Corel, and Compaq. I can't remember the last time those came up.
Badass Resumes
However as always, patches are appreciated.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
It would be better for LaTeX to add hypertext links and for browsers to move to a real presentation system.
You're kidding, right? LaTeX was designed by American computer scientists and mathematicians for the use of American computer scientists and mathematicians, and it shows.
Anything remotely interesting requires the use of flaky macro packages built on hacks within hacks. The underlying technologies are obsolete and non-standard; instead of PDF and OpenType, you have to fiddle around in Knuth's sandbox with DVI and MetaFont, and getting fonts in and documents out is a non-trivial process for the average computer user. And it's stuck in the ASCII world of the 1980s; fine for monolingual Americans, an increasing pain for users of other Latin-scripted languages and other alphabets, and an unrelenting nightmare for any language with a large or complex script. (I managed to get pLaTeX -- the hacked version of LaTeX that supports Japanese -- to output a DVI once. I never managed to print it, or to convert it into any useful electronic format.)
Compare this to HTML, which doesn't require the use of any particular accompanying technologies. The fonts can be any sort of font supplied by the user's OS. The character set can be any character set supported by the browser. It all just works.
There is one area, and only one, in which LaTeX is superior to HTML. That is typesetting mathematics. Oh, wait, the next generation of browsers will have full support for inline MathML. Bang goes the last LaTeX advantage.
Incidentally, I would love to see a LaTeX document that produces a reasonable mockup of the Slashdot front page. I'm guessing the LaTeX that generates it would not be anything like as readable as the HTML+CSS that generates the current page...
Punish those of us who's positive karma was blown away forever by pricks like Michael Sims just because we voiced an opposing viewpoint. Cheers!
Think I'm exaggerating? I went from +2 to 'Terrible' karma after posting a message critical of Michael Sims' "Editing" (and no, it wasn't a troll).
I've had to abandon the login I've had for many years because every message I post from it is automagically modded -1.
Do you really need any other prize besides having frickin' /. in your design portfolio?
A lot of people seem to be criticizing CmdrTaco ethically for holding this competition. I personally don't see it as an issue, but its always interesting what other people's opinions are. BBC is holding a very similar competition (http://open.bbc.co.uk/reboot/). They received a lot of the same negative comments from people that this is like getting a $10,000 job done for half the price with twice the creative control. However these people did not realize the winner would only be showcased for one day and retained complete intellectual property of the design. BBC had this to say about it: "I would completely agree with jay that we would be ripping people off if we were going to turn entries submitted into the final homepage design. But that's not the objective of this competition." Interesting read at any rate, and very relevant to peoples criticisms.
After hearing about the contest, I spent several hours with Inkscape trying out some desings. I'm somewhat comfortable with my concept art at this point, and am just starting to convert it to CSS. The concept JPEG can be seen here: http://www.deviantart.com/view/32444534/.
Clearly, Slashdotters have strong opinions about the site's appearance. Odds are, you probably think my design is shit. That's fine. Go ahead and tell my exactly what you hate about it, and I'll make the improvements. :)