Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot CSS Redesign Contest Update
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.
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.
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
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.
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.
liqbase
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
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.
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.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
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.