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.
That is a very crisp look. it still feels like slashdot, just fresh.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
Yuck. The main body text is in a sans-serif font. Hard to read.
Wow. I didn't realize that, but this is not even "in production" yet, and I'll say that when I first looked at it, I thought -- WOW! This is how Slashdot should look!
I think its very clean and nice, and just looks slick. Personally, I still believe in the sans-serif fonts for headlines and section headings and whatnot, and serif fonts for body as well, but many if not most of the online news sites are pretty much using san-serif fonts all over the place. Its trivial to make this an option for those of us who are registered users (hint, hint).
The only other issue I have with the design is that in my browser, Safari, there are alpha-channel issues with the bottom two grey rounded corner areas. I'm assuming these are PNGs here with an alpha channel.
But otherwise, I think this is very clean and beautiful. I can't wait until that Thursday when this gets thrown out on us!
Kudos for Slashdot for opening this up, and kudos to the guy that did this. If I needed a web designer, I would definitely ask you if you were interested in helping me out.
The original CSS overhaul was not that significant, except that it added div tags and whatnot for the addition for a new CSS overhaul. This is definitely a work in progress.
I looked again, and I can pinpoint the problem better now. The story summary text is the same font size as the menu text on the left and right sidebars. This is what is causing it to all kind of run together, and be painful to read.
As a contrast, look at the runner-up design, which got this right. It is easy to differentiate between, and focus on, any of the page layout sections.
Changes in the CSS shouldn't affect in any way what you see in Links (assuming Links doesn't do much with CSS... haven't tried it in a while. w3m 4 life!!). Of course, some html changes were made it seems, but it looks mostly the same to me. As a frequent text browser user, the main thing that bugs me about slashdot is the glut of links that precede the main body. I don't care to scroll through those links every time.
Looking at the new design (out of text browser land), I will say it's slightly prettier than the current design. However it doesn't seem any more readable and abounds with 1 + 1 = 3 noise in the same way the current design does. People have been reading newspapers for ages, yet newspapers don't make every heading a heavy contrast stripe across the entire page or sharply delimit every margin... Is it because ink is expensive or because ink is distracting? I also would have liked an off-white background and unspecified font size and style of the main text for readability's sake. In my own modest web designing (home pages and such), I'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 can't say I saw any CSS redesign entrants that improved upon that for readability. (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)
The first and the second are both excellent studies in slightly different information philosophies. If you imagine a spectrum of importance on which all information must fall, 0 being not at all important, and 10 being extremely important, then typically in a good design the visual accessibility of each piece of information will be proportional to the level of importance it is assigned. 10-items (headlines, etc) should be highly accessible visually.
The winning design simply shows that the designer believes all information on the slashdot page falls between a 6 and a 10. The second design has a much steeper curve - headlines are a 10, but immediately drops off into the 4-7 range. The visual accessibility curve should always be influenced by both form and function (aesthetics and purpose), but ultimately saying the design is "poor" is a purely subjective, personal view. From technical design, color theory and 2-D theory standpoints it is really quite good. Just not necessarily the best match for slashdot's function.
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Nope, serif typefaces are not more readable on screen at small sizes. One screen pixel is not close to enough to resolve the many intricacies built into the serifs that help print readability and style: instead, they look like mud on screen at anything around 9 points and less. Take a close look at the close-ups shown in the Wikipedia article you provided, or choose several serif typefaces from your word processor of choice, massively boost the text size, and take a close look at the serifs. You will see there is a lot of detail in the serifs and subtle differences between serifs from different typefaces, none of which makes it to the screen at even medium text sizes.
I have just one serious complaint with the winner... The center column, which is the IMPORTANT part of the site, gets very, very badly smashed if your browser window isn't full screen-width, while the other 2 columns are full-width. Big mistake!
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/. and much better than the runner-up, IMHO.
eg.: http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/7969/slashdot0
Fix that one issue, and I won't complain much. It will be a big improvement over traditional
Two minor things though, if anyone is interested:
Many others have already said it, and I agree... There's just too much whitespace around everything. The nav-bar and slashboxes at the sides are twice as tall now, for no good reason. Having 50% whitespace doesn't look good... Not at all.
Please make it a somewhat different color. The "dark-green into black" gradient is very hard on the eyes, and doesn't fit in with the white page anyhow. Either start from a much lighter green, or make it a gradient to white (or grey, or yellow, or anything else that is NOT BLACK!).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant