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Slashdot CSS Redesign Contest Update

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the stay-tuned-to-this-channel-for-more-details dept.

A few weeks back I announced that Slashdot was throwing open its design to the readers. An individual will win a Laptop, and hopefully we'll all win a Slashdot design that looks good. My Journal Entries have chronicled dozens of entries since the contest began, commenting on many of them. Today I share with you 3 of my favorites. These aren't necessarily "Finalists" but I think these are some of the strongest entries. First up is Michael Johnson's design, second is Jason Porritt's entry, and third is a design from Peter Lada. The contest will end around the middle of next week. Entries can be sent to redesign at CmdrTaco.net. Read my journal for extensive commentary on the many entries, to see what stuff has been working and what stuff hasn't.

17 of 577 comments (clear)

  1. Not too bad..... by curtisk · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!

    1. Re:Not too bad..... by Deinhard · · Score: 2, Informative

      There's also some horizontal scrolling at 1024x768.

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      Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
    2. Re:Not too bad..... by curtisk · · Score: 2, Informative

      odd...scroll down to the "retro game hacks" article, the page footer is jammed in there, and in IE you only see half the articles and the footer runs into the last article in an overlap.

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      Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!

    3. Re:Not too bad..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      He's failed to account for the floating behavior of the longest block. He needs to predetermine which block will be the longest (usually, for /., the middle one), and set the other ones to float, rather than the middle one.

  2. When I actually get the fonts big enough... by rminsk · · Score: 5, Informative

    For those of us that don't have perfect vision. All three designs have very small fonts. When I actually make the fonts big enough to read the formatting does not hold up.

    1. Re:When I actually get the fonts big enough... by nutshell42 · · Score: 2, Informative
      For those of us that don't have perfect vision.

      It's not about perfect vision. My eyes are just fine thank you, but I want to keep it that way and when I'm reading web pages at the font sizes they try to force onto me it wouldn't.

      Here's a list from all the links in tacos journal entries that respect your wishes - note that most others could be easily changed to use other sizes for stories and comments it's just that the designers have been too lazy or too control-freaky to do it that way in the first place. (no guarantees, if I missed one or posted the wrong entry by mistake, correct me)

      MCM's design. Layout slightly botched with large font size.

      Kira's revised design. Seems to scale perfectly

      Dave Snyder's Design. The right-hand menu overlaps with the stories.

      Helen Nicholson's design has the same problem but this time the stories are above the menu.

      Hallvar Helleseth's design. Well, it's certainly different. =)

      --
      Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
  3. Re:A feature I'd like to see: the year by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes there is.

    Goto your preferences and Homepage tab.

    Its the first entry on there:

    Current Date/Time
    Using saved preferences
    17:41 11th May, 2006

    Date/Time Format
    [ComboBox allowing format]

    Unfortunately this only works when you are logged in.

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    liqbase :: faster than paper
  4. Re:A feature I'd like to see: the year by TPIRman · · Score: 3, Informative

    Good point, and I agree. In the meantime, you can check the URL of the story -- the two-digit year can be found right after the "sid=" portion of the URL.

  5. Re:Nice by mrchaotica · · Score: 4, Informative

    I like Michael Johnson's too, but ukasz Topa's design is just as cool (and fairly similar).

    --

    "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  6. Re:A feature I'd like to see: the year by bj8rn · · Score: 2, Informative

    Go to Preferences-> Homepage. You can set the date and time format there.

    --
    Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
  7. Peter Lada's design by rsadelle · · Score: 5, Informative

    The other two are slashdotted, so I'll just talk about this one.

    First impression: My God, this is cutesy. (And I mean that in a bad way.) Too many rounded corners, and the light green on the dark green looks off somehow.

    As others have noted, making the font big enough to read screws up the layout. Most notably the posted by name and date disappear completely.

    There are little right-facing triangles next to the "from the X department" lines and the headline only stories. The collapsible menus have downward-facing triangles on them. My first expectation is that clicking on the triangles will trigger the collapse/expand function and turn the triangles so they face down when collapsed and to the right when expanded. This is not at all what they do. If you have an image to signal an action, you shouldn't reuse the same image as a static pretty thing.

    Good things: The font is nice if too small on the default. I like the sensible blocks of color with lines for the menu.

  8. Re:Jason's design by vjmurphy · · Score: 4, Informative

    On Opera 8.5, Jason's design appears to be recursively putting borders and padding around the stories, making them shrink and shrink and shrink continuously. It's somewhat amusing and annoying, so I like it.

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    Vincent J. Murphy
    Spandex Justice
  9. Where's the pink ponies theme? by m50d · · Score: 2, Informative

    OMG!!! That was, like, totally the best!!

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    I am trolling
  10. Re:Why do we need a 'winner'? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    >It's css, if the slashdot site is made properly you could just include alternative css files for all of these themes and let the users choose.
    If most of this is hardcoded(I havn't checked), then the upgrade for web standards was pointless and whoever did it missed the point.

    Case in point (and proof): http://www.csszengarden.com/

  11. Re:Lada - Left/Right Action Inconsist by peterlada · · Score: 2, Informative

    This has been mentioned a few times and I am on track with fixing it. The thing is every header uses the same class name, so I will have to go and alter the bg images for the ids for the headers on the right. I hadn't planned on making them expandable, but it might be a good idea. (sans the ad space, I don't think the advertisers would like that =P )

  12. Re:Jason's design by lynx17 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I know about the Opera infinite loop issue, and I think I have a solution -- I don't think its an Opera bug. I just need time to fix it and the IE bugs I know are present. Thanks for all the comments, and watch for a new version in the next few days that will "hopefully" (crosses fingers) have the IE and Opera bugs fixed.

  13. Use minimum font size by Ahnteis · · Score: 3, Informative

    Use the minimum font size setting in firefox.

    BTW This is not meant as a "stop whining and do this other thing" answer. This is a "thank goodness the web is readable again" sanity stop-gap measure.