Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
User Journal

Journal CmdrTaco's Journal: Redesign VI: The Undiscovered Entry 21

Journal by CmdrTaco

This stack of entries gets me caught up through sunday morning. There are a number of solid entries in this batch. As always- these entries are here to show you guys what I'm looking for in a potential winner. I will be having limited net access until thursday, so I doubt I'll put another entry up here until then. The contest runs until May 17, and you are all welcome to continue to revise/resubmit until then. A comment I made earlier that I'll make again: so far no entry that has abandoned the Coliseo font has worked for me. Likewise, I don't care for the visual abbreviation '/.'. If you choose to use it, do so sparingly. Note that it doesn't appear in the existing design at all. And because several of you are missing this- the topic icons in the upper right hand corner are expendable. Dump them at will. Successful alternatives for that space have included login forms, and the user menu, as well as the search form. Also, the advertisement up top must stand alone. Don't put a logo to the left or right of it.

The contest is still wide open- there are a half a dozen entries that I think stand above the rest, but every day I see another entry that reminds me that this thing could go to anyone. I hope you're enjoying this as much as I am. The creativity and energy that some of these designs are showing is really making this fun for me.

MCM's design is a real mixed bag. One thing that he tries is to bring the sectional color schemes to the main page. I've often toyed with this idea, but never could make it work, and I suspect from his design, you'll see why. It's a lot of colors to work with. He's doing wierd layout things- multiple columns of articles, expanding/contracting articles. I like the economical header, although it doesn't scale horiziontally all that well. All in all, I think this design is most interesting simply as a pure 'What if'. I appreciate that this one is really thinking far outside the box. I'm pretty sure it won't work for slashdot.

Morgan Davis's 'Shiny' Design is another clean, simple entry. He changes very little in terms of layout, except the search box/topic icon stuff that most of the better entries seem to share. Once again, a compact header gets us to the meat of the page faster. I don't care for his slogan space- that grey box kind of sticks out... however we have a number of system messages ('you have mod points' 'or 'have you meta moderated lately') that could be placed in that space. A LOT of designs fail to account for those messages... I think that bears repeating- we have a spot for system messges that a lot of designs don't incorporate. The article headers are cool, but the page doesn't scale very well. if I shrink my browser much, I get the wretched horizontal scrollbars. But this is a deserving entry.

Khoury Brazil's design is a reasonable entry, but I share it here because of the interesting handling of the right side slashboxes. By making the menus 2 columns, this design (i think) successfully integrates slashboxes & navigational elements into a single column. I'm not sure how well it would work for users who have a halfdozen or more slashboxes... I also think that the header is a little dull.

Kira's revised design goes a little gradient nutty but it looks pretty solid. I really like the shadow between articles and slashboxes. Not sure that the reflection on the article titles works. But it's a nice design. The logo really pops in this one.

Hallvar Helleseth has another design that is currently a very rough mockup missing a lot of bits but it's quite stylish so I share it. I love how the logo and slashboxes jut up into the black space atop the pge. I'm not sure where he's going with the overall design, but that one element is just cool. He looks like he's going to try something unusual in the right hand column. I wonder if he can make it work visually and functionally. This article layout is boring, but given hoow nice the header looks, hopefully he'll give it some good lovin' too.

Adam Marsh's entry is back and this time in a CSS form. I think his slashboxes are a bit heavy- I think the diagonal mark on the right works, but on the left doesn't. I don't cre for the neon-teal color he is using a lot in this design either. I mostly like his article layout, but I think putting the topic icons in a 'box' is a mistake given the wide range of aspect ratios these icons fit. Maintaining this look would make a wide or tall icon unreadably small. His footer doesn't appear at the bottom of my page, and I don't see what abbreviated articles or system emssages would look like. I miss my old Slashdot Font. And (this should tell you how anal I can be about certain things) in the upper left hand corner he has a /. integrated into the logo... but that dot is a square. In the right hand slashboxes he has a /. integrated into the right side of the header. That dot is a circle. Consistency is an important design consideration. The top and bottom of his left hand menu get lost- those curves are so subtle I can't even see them. Maybe those coudl be given a different color scheme. If the cap/foot on the menu works, maybe it could be echodon the slashboxes to give a little more balance to the page.

David Steele's design goes a different route. His design is a bit blockier. A bit more spacious. He relies on good color decisions more than fancy graphical foo for his to work. I miss my old font. I think his whole header needs to be tightened up- a dedicated line for search for example is unnecessary. I think that as a user scrolls down they will visually lose the green. Also we have a number of navigational issues since a lot of menu items are missing. But this design really hasa a lot going for it.

Olav's design is clean and simple. I don't think seperating the advertisement out on the right is a good idea tho. I do like how he uses strong colors in different slashboxes to seperate things out. I think his article layouts are clean, but a little generic. His menu suffers from some of the issues I've discussed on other entries already. But for a clean/flat/simple design this is a nice. He proves you don't need gradients to look good ;)

Oliver's continued design plans now come to us in CSS form. I think the header is nice, but simple. The search box doesn't line up quite right in there. His article layout is clean, but that floating topic box doesn't do it for me. His quote text in the footer is huuuge. I'd like to see his article headers more clearly reflect the visual style of his page header (white on green, some shading or curves or something) but beyond that, for a design that essentially mimics Slashdot's layout of today, this is excellent.

melissa's design is another clean one on white. I like her subtle work on the slashbox area. I think her tag layout doesn't fit well with the rest of her article layout As usual, I don't much care for the subtle light grey /. in the upper left corner. But once again, this is a very clean, minimal design. Easy on the eyes. Maybe a bit to easy for me.

Lukasz Lukasiewicz's design starts off on the wrong foot by giving me the design in blue. But the design he gives me is really nice. I really love his article footer. Clean. Minimal. Elegant. Likewise his left hand menu highlights sections really well. The footer also returns the colors used at the top and lays out the footer extremely well. He overuses the /. ascii shortcut, and doesn't really do any substantial layout changes to spek of. I'm not sure about the pinkish purple accent color he's chosen either. I think that with a different color scheme, and some subtle refinements this design could be a strong contender.

An interesting note: the designs continue to fall into 2 major classes: the ones that refresh the existing design, and the ones that break the border and try something new. Almost without fail, the thing that seperates them is the choice to keep the black border and upper left hand curve that surrounds every slashdot page. I don't think either of these elements are essential at this point. I think the Coliseo font is however necessary. I don't think I've seen a design yet without the font that worked for me.

Good luck to everyone who is still reading...

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Redesign VI: The Undiscovered Entry More

Redesign VI: The Undiscovered Entry

Comments Filter:
  • http://www.optimle.com/slashdot/index.htm [optimle.com]

    Please recommend changes...

    Thanks,

    Jason

    • I like the clean feel to it. Two things that didn't jump out at me, but are probably useful: you should have a bit of padding on the left of the article boxes... right now the dept line and the article aren't lined up with the title, and it probably adds a layer of discord to the page you don't want. Also try putting 'Search Slashdot' as the default text of the search box. You've got the "Search" button to the right there, and the extra text (especially all caps) adds too much "stuff" there. Of course m
    • wow. this one is my favorite of all the ones CmdrTaco has been showing. Nice job. I'd recommend the padding to the left of the articles as well, but other than that, it's an extremely readable and nice-looking site. (FWIW)
    • I like this one. Nice and simple.
    • very nice, jason. it still has the slashdot look and feel, but it's organized much more cleanly than the current site. just a few small things i'd personally change:
      1. make the link to view more comments on the word "comments" instead of on each number, such as "0 of 0 comments" instead of "0 of 0 comments
      2. make the whole title of the article/posting a link to read more instead of just having a "Read More..." at the end
      3. and i don't know how much control you'd have over this... but there's some white space
      • eh, i just saw taht the links i applied didn't make it through the filter for #1. it's suppose to look kinda like this...
        1. make the link to view more comments on the word "comments" instead of on each number, such as "0 of 0 comments" instead of "0 of 0 comments"
    • Very clean. I like clean.

      (I'm too stupid to have anything better to say)

    • First, the blue does not work with the green. They are simply too close on the color wheel to appear balanced.

      Then, you need more whitespace around the article text. Text needs breathing room to be readable.

      Finally, the way the text wraps around the topic icons is funky. The reader's eye expects each line to begin immediately below the last, yet your layout has lines starting all over the place depending on the topic icon's width. Hint: all topic icons are less than 100px wide, so just indent all your a

  • http://www.dodeci.com/slashdot [dodeci.com] http://www.dodeci.com/slashdot/index2.shtml [dodeci.com] - fixed width, planning on it being liquid when 960 wide. I agree with CmdrTaco about the search bar on one line and the header needing to be tightened a bit. Not sure about "losing the green" though... Any suggestions all around? Thanks!
    • Sorry about that - need my line breaks

      http://www.dodeci.com/slashdot [dodeci.com]

      http://www.dodeci.com/slashdot/index2.shtml [dodeci.com] - fixed width, planning on it being liquid when 960 wide.

      I agree with CmdrTaco about the search bar on one line and the header needing to be tightened a bit. Not sure about "losing the green" though...

      Any suggestions all around? Thanks!
      • Not enough visual distinction between the articles, the top and the sidebar. Also, there isn't enough space between the individual articles. It looks like a big cluttered mass of information as a result, and it's unreadable.

        Looks great though, discounting that flaw. I have a feeling that by putting an extra 0 onto some of the margins, it'd become quite nice.

    • Out of all the entries from day one, yours is definitely up there (#1 or #2, Peter Lada's design is very nice as well) My suggestions are to 1. Get rid of those 5 images (logos?) to the right of the slashdot logo 2. Give alternating articles different background hues (slashdot green and white, for example, for improved readability. 3. For the titles on the right, (slashdot login, ask slashdot) give them more contrast from the rest of the column, it is hard to tell them apart. 4. Make the stories expandabl
      • My bad, I was commenting a different design, I meant to comment yours. 1. crop the banner. Too much height, and too much whitespace. Readers want to get to the articles without scrolling down so much. 2. Move the navigation up one bar, and make the navigation/ search all in one bar. For contrast, keep the green color that is the navigation bar, but only have a sliver of the blue color left that is the search bar. 3. make article headings smaller in height, they are too high. 4. Read more..x of x comments..
  • http://www.dustrunners.com/slashdot/indexe.php [dustrunners.com]

    I swear I won't make any more designs from this point on. It's been fun, but I have to focus on more serious things now, like drawing angry parakeets.

    Comments welcome, all the same.
  • Everyone else is posting their entries... http://www.20somethingdesign.com/clients/slashdot/ [20somethingdesign.com] Suggestions or critiques are certainly welcome and appreciated. :)
  • I think there was nothing really wrong with the old design, actually, but throwing shiny graphics and pull down menus everywhere won't help. Those things are too distracting from the main content, and don't really "look" like slashdot. That said, a total redesign of Slashdot is not needed. I like to think I've made some improvements to the Slashdot look and feel with this user style [userstyles.org]. I don't know if I'll enter this in the contest or not. It fixes an inconsistency with the sidebars, which is that the slash
  • Here is my improved version with green headline bars (as wished by the commander), and a rich header.

    http://www.informationarchitects.jp/slash6/slashdo t.htm [informationarchitects.jp]

    I had to add the grey menu as a green only header was colliding with the green bars.

    But actually I like the horizontal menu a lot it's simple and it gives good orientation.

    Stubborn Information Designer as I am I still believe the green titles on white ground (as in my previous sketches) work better than those green bars. See my forst sketc
  • Because I submitted my designs three times over the past week and a half and my web logs show myself as being the only person who has viewed the .pngs (not ready to convert them to CSS just yet). Is redesign at cmdrtaco.net not the correct e-mail address to send the URL to?
  • I must say that Morgan Davis's 'Shiny' Design is easily my favourite entry. If Morgan's design does not get picked by the judge(s), then Morgan should please contact me (theguy(AT)tinfoil(DOT)net) and perhaps I can put it to use.

Slashdot Top Deals

Make sure your code does nothing gracefully.

Close