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 $250 runner up prize.
Lastly, our corporate lawyer tells us that you are required to read the official rules before you enter.
Good luck to everyone. Happy designing. Have fun... I can't wait to see what people come up with!
SWEET!
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Just reuse this one.
You can send the laptop to:
Troll, inc
Under your bridge
Mid-town, USA 00192
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
If multiple entries prove to be good, especially for different targets (e.g., Light HTML, Mobile Presentation, etc) then it should be trivial to implement having multiple stylesheets the user can select, either via the browser's stylesheet selector, or in the user preferences.
However I quite liked the OMG Ponies design...
I don't think that you find people complaining about how /. looks, you find them complaining about:
/. effect (Option of nyud.net:8080 in the original links).
1) Slashvertisements
2) Duplicate, triplicates et cetera
3) Spelling errors.
4) No mechanisms to protect the
and so on...
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
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?
Three things.
I'm assuming this is for the entire interface. e.g. registered users versus non-registered.
Would you reconsider if we redid all 150 topic icons?
Bonus points if we can target PDA's and cellphones?
Remeber this story?
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
How about something that blocks all Dvorak articles?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Heh... you mean back to a site where submitters and users spell like the 12-year olds they are and where the readers actually *do* all the work without credit ? Well, hey - who cares about content as long as the design is all about ponies ?
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Thank the guy some posts below for the original link.
o l.css
http://slashdot.cuteness.org/slashdot/slashdot_fo
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
You don't really need Slashcode to do the design, though. You can simply save a few sample pages to straight HTML and then just change the stylesheet. You may need to fudge a few things here and there, but it appears to work fine with the Firefox File/Save Page As... menu item.
Quick! Some Anonomous Coward send Taco a link to Digg.com just to fuck with him.
site that requires active X. I think that would be extremely popular. >:)
We demand a signed photograph of CmdrTaco as a runner up prize. Mod this up if you agree!
I'm not really planning on opening the box ;)
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
10. Creative treatment of grammatical errors Some sort of highlighting for its/it's errors would be nice.
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!
It isn't necessary to install slashcode. You can just save-as Slashdot's index.shtml file, and start building your own CSS file.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
...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.
This one made me forget about entering. You listed the main things I hate the most about the current design. And while you say 'you can ignore me of course', it is strongly implied that this would be an exercise in futility.
I'm not sure I know how to please someone who's aesthetic discretion module is so blinkered as to actually cause an affection for Coliseo. :)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
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
I have a few real questions:
1. By redesign, do you mean graphic design or both graphic and functional design (functional != moving links)?
2. Where are your templates, provide a kit please (including logos and the topic icons you talk about). Pro-bono workers won't really like to waste their time fishing for files. Don't talk to me about firefox webdev extension.
3. What is trademarked, or has any legal aspects?
4. Is it open to residents of the Province of Québec (Canada)?
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?
That's old-hat - why not use AJAX blink!
£5.99 domain registration/transfer: the cheapest in Europe
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
If you use the firefox web developer toolbar you can edit the CSS right there and see it applied instantly. This also gives you the flexability to view other pages with your CSS.
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!
Third prize is "You're fired".
You sound like one of the Knights who say "Ni!"
"something that looks fresh, something that is not cluttered...but not too expensive. Oh, and a second one over here for a kind of split level effect. Then you must create all of your CSS pages with.....(wait for it)
A HERRING!"
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
* {
font-family: comics-sans;
text-transform: uppercase;
color: pink;
font-weigth: bold;
}
-Woof woof woof!
Is javascript using some of the more well known frameworks/scripts (ie: dojo or prototype) allowed?
Coliseo Font (direct download)... from here in case they don't link the hotlinking to the zip file.
Good luck everyone!
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
It might be useful, since we could stick to whatever layout you are used to now anyway.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Over at the Museum of Modern Art's website, they're asking their members to recommend a new back-end database architecture and help them do the math to optimize the content streaming on their edge servers. They're even giving a prize of six passes to the upcoming Edward Munch exhibition to whomever proposes the most creative Disaster Recovery plan for their server room. Some synchronicity, huh?
Wait... they're NOT?
sorry... never mind...
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.
check out my brand new design:
http://s87360432.onlinehome.us/slashdot.html
After reading the rules, like the one that says 'echo the current layout' and 'use the same font' and 'dont change the graphics' - I REALLY think taco will pick my new layout. New laptop, here I come!!
..and mebbe add in a little A.J.A.X. to asynchronously slashdot all the stories ?
[all generalizations are untrue except this one]
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.
I'm sorry, but I can't throw any support behind this endeavour at all. After all, I think it's time to go back and look at what was just said:
Hey guys! I'm more than willing to let you redesign this place. Oh, keep that shitty logotype, and that "Slashdot Green", and the crappily-compressed icons of yesteryear. Actually, what we want is you to just change things minimally, and we want to do as little work on the Slashcode backend (and information architecture) as possible.
The point you guys are missing here is twofold: first, a redesign is more than just skin-deep; second, it's hard to even get to the skin-deep side of things when you're stifling creativity to the point of where the only thing you want to see is exactly what you've got now. Just go do a find/replace and change section heads to Helvetica and body copy to Georgia, space out your line-height a bit more, and voila! instant Slashdot "redesign". I wouldn't even call it much of a facelift.
You guys are trying to compete with places that are obviously out of your league from a UI perspective at that. As my friend Stick_Fig said above, Digg works because it's drastically cleaner on the frontend, and the only way to get that cleanliness on Slashdot in a CSS change would be to add a ton of display: none; to the code. This offers no benefit in decreasing load time to the user and just makes the site that more frivolous.
You've already lost some part of your readerbase to sites like Digg (which is a forbidden term around these parts) and quick-access links lists like del.icio.us popular. Asking for a facelift isn't helping your cause.
Anyway, let's get to that point: Changing a CSS file is not a "redesign". Saying so is just fooling yourself. A true redesign would take into account plenty of information architecture, markup optimisation, and a total re-thinking of Slashcode's interface. It's not enough to simply change green to blue and underline your links with dotted borders. A redesign requires changes to the markup both for semantics/accessibility as well as to maintain a coherent architecture across the redesign. A redesign requires thinking outside of the box on comment layout, administrative interface, and site structure.
You should be allowing designers and developers to tweak Slashcode itself as well as the template's markup. This readerbase is more than talented enough to do so. Once the aging Slashcode dinosaur is brought into check and architecture has been optimised, things can move along smoothly on the CSS end of things. And no, that HTML/CSS thing that you guys did a few months back (that CmdrTaco is saying was so snazzy) really doesn't change much of anything. Changing markup and not changing any internal IA structure is useless, and this contest is exactly what designer Khoi Vinh complained about in October.
Slashdot, you're pretty much keeping yourself right on the same track. This is just as short-sighted as the original concept was, and I don't see anything changing drastically here in the near future. From the article on Publish.com:
I hereby petition you not to accept any design based chiefly around the color purple. Any other color (OMG PONIES included ... that's a valid HTML color name, right?) is acceptable, but not purple.
I won't be submitting an entry for two reasons - first, I actually like the layout of Slashdot. It's one of the most readable layouts out there, conforms nicely to all of the "best practices" of typesetting, and is far more elegant than 99.9% of all other blogs out there. That's one major reason I've stayed with Slashdot. The other reason is that I regard CSS as satanic hellspawn, the consequence of major corporations molesting the W3C. It would be better for LaTeX to add hypertext links and for browsers to move to a real presentation system. That's not going to happen. Hell, efforts by people to support TCL as a replacement for Java haven't got anywhere, and far more people use TCL than use LaTeX. Internet Explorer doesn't even have proper PNG support yet!
What's needed isn't a new look & feel, what's needed is a scoreboard. Each company's website totally smashed by a Slashdotting scores 5 points, 4 points for a SQL error, 1 point for merely being slowed and -2 if there's no noticeable impact. A bonus of 10 points should be awarded if it's a major corporation.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
http://www.searchfreefonts.com/fonts/c29.htm
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
On the other hand for a student, like me, being able to say that your work is daily being watched by around 500,000 people looks good on your CV. I'l be entering, for sure.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Offer $3500 for a redesigned site to somebody else... submit all the good designs you get. Then take the $1000 difference and stuff it in your pocket. Well.. it might be hard with a laptop but you can do it. :)
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I have a great idea for a redesign, and it retains the same color of green, but we'd have to rename the site to "Hulk Smashdot!"
Is that acceptable?
Comment of the year
AC says:
Minors in the USA can sign contracts.
(And provides supporting links.)
Point, but I believe your links also provide evidence for my assertion that in this case it's just not worth it, as it can get much more complicated.
But thanks for the correction.
I have an even better contest. I call it "Do My Job 2006."
1. I send you a list of my job duties.
2. You do my job.
3. You give your results to me.
4. Of all applications, I choose the best to reward with a paltry fraction of my income in the form of a prize.
The most depressing section though, is ePlus. Last real article posted there was in 1998 (and all 3 articles posted there in total had zero comments?!), although in 2005 there's an empty article that I think is the remains of an April Fool's joke that's since been deleted.
That said, even if a section has only one story, I'm not sure that they can really be deleted. After all, those stories (and their associated comments) are sort of part of Slashdot's (and the Internet's in general) history; I think it's better that they remain accessible by category somehow. Although maybe they could be buried down on a "Defunct Sections" page and removed from the list of open categories that can be submitted to.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Collaborate to de-GIF the Slashdot icons for the benefit of all.
Taco: Could you explain your model, young man?
Anonymous Coward: What's to explain? He's an idiot!
Mods: Pipe down!
Eddeye: Well basically, I just copied the plant we have now.
Taco: Mm-hmm.
Eddeye: Then, I added some fins to lower wind resistance. And this racing stripe here I feel is pretty sharp.
Taco: Agreed. First prize!
Anonymous Coward: But it, it was a contest for children!
Mods: Yeah. And Eddeye beat their brains out!
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
Not to sounds like a know it all SOB, but 3 weeks for pro bono design and development is somewhat rushed. At the very least, this time table is going to alienate the best professional designers that frequent this site. In my experience, the really good designers are busy, and if you want to get free work from them, you need to give them some time. On the other hand, there are tons of mediocre "designers" that have all the time in the world.
Slashdot is a large site and could be a great portfolio piece. I will probably forward this info to my colleagues. Yet I don't think this contest properly geared toward the design process. That could result in a final site that isn't as successful as it could be.
For a high traffic site you really want something more then a shinny skin. You want someone to consider more then development and contemporary graphics. You want someone to who understands branding, interaction, typography, psychology, and other aspects of visual communication. Realistically, a small site for a paying client might need two weeks for sketches and or photoshop / illustrator comps, and an additional week for an interactive comp. For a non-paying client, I'd doubt that time frame.
Once again, I don't intend to sounds like a whiny SOB, and I'm sure someone will flame the hell out of this post, nevertheless there things the boys behind Slashdot could do to assure a better end result. At the very least, give the contest a 2 month deadline, and pass this information to organizations like the AIGA. You'll get a better selection of successful solutions.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Make the world a better place. Kill a spammer today.
Every time you masturbate, God kills a spammer. Thanks for making the world a better place, slashdotters.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
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.
But you'll bitch and moan about broken PNG support in IE?
Also, have you unblocked the W3C validator yet?
Free Hans!
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. :)
I think you will find the information in the link below pretty valuable. The fact that you are offering this contest is disgusting, and in the long-run contests like this do harm to the design industry as a whole. Congratulations, news about this contest is going to spread like wildfire, and many designers will look at Slashdot with negative implications:
http://www.no-spec.com/
Gee, next time I can't afford to get something done, I'll just label it a contest and have designers do it for free in hopes that they'll get a prize.