Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot CSS Redesign Winner Announced
The winner of the contest is Alex Bendiken. He will receive a new laptop as well as bragging rights as the creator of the new look of Slashdot. You can see his winning design in a near complete form now. Feel free to comment on any compatibility issues. We plan to take this live in the next few days. There will undoubtedly be a few minor glitches, but please submit bug reports and we'll sort it out as fast as possible. Also congratulations to Peter Lada, our runner up. He gets $250 credit at ThinkGeek. Thanks to everyone who participated- it was a lot of fun.
I really like the current look of Slashdot. What was the point in changing it? Just to change it?
~S
We all want to know what sort of laptop he's getting ;-)
(looks fantastic btw, job well done)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Id just like to congratulate Mr. Alex Bendiken on a job well done and that his design was also one of my favorite designs throughout the contest. I cant wait till the design is rolled out onto the live server.
GL HF!
Many of the entries were just too busy and distracting, or very Digg-ish (i.e. looked like a soul-less link farm). The winning design IMHO doesn't muck with things too much, but gives an aesthetically pleasing facelift to Slashdot. The only problem I could see with it is that the "Slashdot" logo (presumably should appear in the upper left) didn't show up on any browser I tried.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
It looks nice, I guess. But I really like slashdot as-is. Biggest complaint is the new location of the 'Read More...' link after stories. I'll be searching for it for a month or two before I get it down to muscle memory like the current one.
Unpleasantries.
Yuck. The main body text is in a sans-serif font. Hard to read.
i like the second place entry better.
Supplies!
Just my 2 cents, but I think the use of a downward-pointing triangle on the left-most section headers is a poor choice. My natural tendancy (which may differ from yours) is to click on the triangle, expecting a drop-down menu. Instead, it does nothing in Firefox 1.5.0.3.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
I actually like the runner-up's design better. The winner's is simple and clean but blocky and unfriendly. The runner-up's has a more friendly feel to it. I guess it's all the sharp corners vs. the rounded ones.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
What about the light mode?
/. stories and comments. IMHO, it is the best way to view /. with no mess and a minimum of garish color schemes. The only thing it lacks is the Poll slashbox.
/. and I'm worried that it'll be removed as an option.
I have Simple Design, Low Bandwidth, and No Icons checked in my preferences. This gives me a very streamlined, efficient way to read
The winner's entry doesn't show this view of
Please calm my fears! Tell me light mode will be part of the new look.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Looks to be the same to me, save a smaller harder to read font. A lot of other entries looked a lot more pleasant (no, I didn't submit, so I'm not bitter). I know Taco wanted the site to be different yet the same, but I think this is far too much on the "same" path. Not all change is bad, Taco.
today is spelling optional day.
I wonder if Peter's design going to be used as-is, or if Taco will make a few tweaks to it first. For example, Alex's design incorporates quotes as separate, indented paragraphs. Slashdot not only lacks this capability today, but Taco himself pointed out that it is not feasible given how much the quotes and editor comments tend to be mixed. Perhaps he's changed his mind?
Seperating the quotes does not require a change in the page structure. Right now all quotes are already in italics, so all he had to do was re-define the italics style with a border and some padding on the left.
-bradly
No offense to the design winner, but too often CSS styles websites just end up a bunch of gradient filled rounded corner boxes. Its like the CSS community thinks with one brain cell. The collapsing side menu is a nice touch though. I would hope that the state of the menu will persist between sessions. Having something collapse or expand is annoying if it resets on every visit to the page (i.e. no point in offering it then). Also, I hope you bring back the running tape of the last few article icons at the top of the page. At a glance I can decide if I should bother to read slashdot or wait for an interesting icon to appear first.
Overall though, it is only a cosmetic change to Slashdot, and I don't think there is any reason why Slashdot cannot start adding theme support to their website. Why fixate on one theme? Why not take the top 5 designs and offer them in the preferences. That IS of course the beauty of designing a website with CSS. With one change of the CSS link, you can have your website easily look completely different.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Some of us have a real hard time reading sans-serif fonts. I also like the existing soft edges a lot better than the harshness of the new design. But like everything else in this world, no one seems to give a damn what I think.
This design is too busy and too dense. You need to put some more whitespace in here. It is hard to focus on just the story summaries, for example, without feeling encroached on by the other elements.
Also, News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters is too tall and thin. It is difficult to read and distracting.
I wish we had something a little more fresh. This design it a little too loyal to the legacy design.
I do appreciate the move to Sans Serif fonts, however.
I like it. It has a nice clean look. I'm glad too see that the italics and serifs are gone. They are hard to read on many displays.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
When it comes to web design, you don't always want to come up with something really different. In this case, Slashdot wasn't broken, and he decided to not fix what wasn't broken. He redesigned it just enough to make it something new and improved, but not enough to make it so different that people will feel uncomfortable with. To extend the house analogy, when redesigning your house, you would want to stick with something similar to what you're already comfortable with.
Register the editry.
A site that is dedicated mostly towards issues concerning the open source and Linux community should at the very least support browsing via Lynx and Links.
I am sad to report, however, that neither browser renders the site in a fashion that is suitable for everyday reading. I don't blame the browsers themselves. A site like OSNews manages to render excellently with both, while offering a similar layout as here.
My main concern, though, is that these "advanced" interfaces are making Slashdot harder and harder to read in browsers like Links. It used to be totally text-browser friendly, but that is no longer the case. Sad for a so-called techie site...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Personally, I feel the design was quite well thought-out. Here's what I noticed:
Here's what I think could be improved upon:
I understand that this is how things are on the current site, and simply persisted in the new graphical makeover.
Can we get rid of the all uppercase Slashdot slogan? "NEWS FOR NERDS. STUFF THAT MATTERS." I don't want to get yelled at everytime I go to Slashdot. Just make it normal "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
Why not have a selection of different CSS styles to choose from when you are logged in? That way people can select themselves what they like most.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You guys have obviously never been hacked.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
To the creator of the new design (in case he reads this): a "cursor: pointer" style would be nice, and possibly a hover attribute on the tag that has the section name, for those without internet explorer.
Everyone loves some sort of visual cue.
Looks good though.
Rob didn't want something radical, he wanted an updating of slashdot itself; similar, but better. For everyone here who thinks it sucks and how dare Rob do something this screwed up to "your" site, go make a site and for your own community there! That's what Rob did 10 years ago.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
If you ahve to explain where the collapsable section is, it is not a good lay out.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm honestly seeing no comparison to the Mac OS. Have you had any exposure to or experience with the Mac OS at any point? 'Cause I have, a few different times, and this design has precisely zero to do with anything Apple makes... Is it their Web site, which also uses a controversial white background? Or what?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Putting a re-design to a vote of Slashdot readers would be the ultimate example of design-by-committee, and would therefore result in the ultimate in useless, unreadable, un-navigable websites.
In my opinion, the second place entry is miles away from the first place, and quick frankly, rather poor. There is little contrast - everything just kinda blends into one... one blegh. It certainly looks as if it were designed by an engineer, not by a graphic/UI person - perhaps engineers like to look at the website equivalent of pudding all day.
If that was second place, I dread seeing those further down the line.
The redesign chosen is definitely an improvement over the current look.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Please just use the user's default font and font size! pleeeeease! That's one thing I always liked about slashdot. There is really no need to screw with the fonts.
I'm in the minority of people who actually likes the design and looks forward to using it. Way to go!
firestream.net
The purpose of CSS is not to make pages pretty. It's to make pages portable.
What do you think this is, 1999 or something ?
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
You're downplaying the original CSS redesign. Before the redesign, Slashdot was not anywhere near CSS/HTML spec compliant. The redesign accomplished 2 things:
- pages load faster due to smaller pages
- seperated most of the styling from the content (CSS)
- easier to maintain/modify
Don't downplay the original CSS redesign. While the front look may have not been altered much, a lot of changes went on behind the scenes.
When I look at the winning design by Alex Bendiken, I can't find any portion of it that has been done better than Peter's. The nesting menus on the left aren't nearly as smooth, and the text size is the same as the article text, so everything seems to blend together. I commend Alex for attempting to make teal look trendy again, but he has failed. Peter's color choice, although only slightly lighter, makes all the difference. Differentiating between separate sections of the site is extremely easy as well. It is obvious that Peter put a lot of thought into simulating real-world readership when he designed his layout. As far as content delivery goes, Alex's design floats boxes and dumps content in. Peter's is much more polished, with slight accents between copy shifts. This makes the right things stand out where they should. He even included a lovely box for the new tagging system, which is completely absent from Alex's design. The Slashdot people need to create functionality for users to pick their primary content layout from a list. After all, one of the main advantages of CSS is the ability to completely change the design of a site with just one click from the end user. I guess we can't expect much from a judge who's homepage looks like it's frozen in 1993.
P.S. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated.
Is it because ink is expensive or because ink is distracting?
I'd imagine that it's a little of both. Don't forget that major newspapers will be printing hundreds of thousands or millions of papers every day; all that ink is going to add up over the course of a year.
There are also other issues, of course - newsprint tends to come off on your fingers, so if there was a lot of extra cosmetic ink on the page, the readers' fingers would get that much dirtier (I know I hate how dirty my fingers get after reading a paper now).
Finally, PCs are not newspapers. They have different design considerations, and so naturally lend themselves to different types of design.
've come across a good rule of thumb: if the page is more readable in lynx, links, or w3m than it is in Firefox, then it needs work. The current slashdot is pretty darn readable in a text browser once you get past the ton of links at the top
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say there - do you mean that the current page *does* need to be redesigned?
Now if I was hanging slashdot on my wall, I might prefer one of the CSS redesigns... but I'm not; I'm reading it
I know where you're coming from, but for me (and I suspect a lot of people), I tend to spend a very large proportion of my day staring at my monitor. What's on it had better be pleasing to my eye, and while plain text in a terminal window is definitely *usable*, it's not very aesthetically pleasing. That's a very subjective thing, of course, but my opinion would be the exact opposite of yours.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
You should try reading your journal entries yourself:
Generally I hold slashdot users as a group more intelligent than the average person, so seeing bigotry - which is the direct manifestation of ignorance and immaturity - running around slashdot like wildfire was disturbing so say the least
I think you've just made a prime example of yourself.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
As a user interface designer I'll put in my 2c. For me the runner up is significantly less polished and a much clumsier design. It is 'heavy' in parts and looks quite dated.
The winner is much more subtle, makes more use of light and shade and will not age as rapidly.
The runner up is more initially striking it would become tiring quickly. I feel the right choice has been made and looking at the code behind it, appears an elegant solution.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
Tahoma as primary body font is a disastrous choice, particularly on CRT screens. The letters are generally spaced so narrowly that words are hard to read, particularly between letters like i and l ("million"). And there is no italic, so the normal weight gets forcibly slanted. Tahoma is intended for use in dialog boxes and menus, not body text and headlines.