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.

Not too bad.....

[curtisk]

They all have their strong points, but Michael Johnson's design [insitemotion.com] 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.

When I actually get the fonts big enough...

[rminsk]

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.

Re:Not too bad.....

[Deinhard]

There's also some horizontal scrolling at 1024x768.

Re:Not too bad.....

[curtisk]

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.

Re:A feature I'd like to see: the year

[LiquidCoooled]

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.

Re:A feature I'd like to see: the year

[TPIRman]

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.

Re:Nice

[mrchaotica]

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

Re:A feature I'd like to see: the year

[bj8rn]

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

Re:Not too bad.....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Peter Lada's design

[rsadelle]

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.

Re:Jason's design

[vjmurphy]

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.

Where's the pink ponies theme?

[m50d]

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

Re:Why do we need a 'winner'?

[Anonymous Coward]

>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/ [csszengarden.com]

Re:Lada - Left/Right Action Inconsist

[peterlada]

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 )

Re:Jason's design

[lynx17]

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.

Use minimum font size

[Ahnteis]

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.

Re:When I actually get the fonts big enough...

[nutshell42]

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. [dustrunners.com] Layout slightly botched with large font size.

Kira's revised design. [lightsphere.com] Seems to scale perfectly

Dave Snyder's Design. [xyrrus.com] The right-hand menu overlaps with the stories.

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

Hallvar Helleseth's design. [sykosopp.com] Well, it's certainly different. =)