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 have to say

[Soporific]

I really like the current look of Slashdot. What was the point in changing it? Just to change it?

~S

Re:I have to say

[tha_mink]

I have to say that the runner-up is so much better it hurts. The problem with slashdot is all the noise. The collapseable sections would be a much welcome improvement. Don't see why they didn't go with the runner up. Just my 2cents

I agree. The runner-up seems FAR better.

[Richard Steiner]

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...

Re:I agree. The runner-up seems FAR better.

[fossa]

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)

Re:I agree. The runner-up seems FAR better.

[Tim C]

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.

Re:I agree. The runner-up seems FAR better.

[fbjon]

Perhaps you don't realise it, but there's a good reason why it's always recommended to have good lighting in the room when using a TV or monitor. This is so that the ambient lighting has the same luminosity as the screen, effectively turning this fluorescent assault of yours into the exact same relative brightness as that off-white book of yours.

If you really have to sit in a dark room, then you should know how to turn the brightness down accordingly, also a recommended thing to do. The assault happens beca

That's the whole point

[fm6]

If the new CSS support is any good, Slashdot should work better in text-based browsers. The whole point of using CSS is to separate content from presentation. That makes it possible to take the same page and display it sanely on a GUI browser, a text browser, a PDA...

The purpose of CSS is not to make pages pretty. It's to make pages portable.

Re:That's the whole point

[Issue9mm]

And if they don't understand the CSS, they'll ignore it, which typically means that (assuming correct CSS), it saves time by not downloading useless crap that their browser can't use anyway.

Re:That's the whole point

[fm6]

If by "useless crap" you mean overhead due to eye-candy graphics, you're wrong. I just tried looking at the new design with CSS disabled. (This is a feature of Firefox's Web Developer Extension [chrispederick.com], which no serious HTML author should be without.) I basically saw everything I saw with CSS enabled, but without the fancy formatting. Really, the people who get saved from "crap" are the people with CSS support, since they get the eye-candy without the overhead of graphic file download.

The designner obviously didn't do this check, or else he would have noticed that the <div> containing the left-hand sidebar gets displayed first, making the user do a lot of scrolling to get to the actually content.

Re:That's the whole point

[fm6]

he designner obviously didn't do this check, or else he would have noticed that the

containing the left-hand sidebar gets displayed first, making the user do a lot of scrolling to get to the actually content.

Correction: the designer did see this issue. There's a link that scrolls past the sidebars that's only visible when you use the PDA styles or no styles at all.

Turn in Slacker Credentials at the Door

[bill_mcgonigle]

absofuckinglutely stupid unless you're blind and using a screen reader

You greatly underestimate how much like Work Slashdot looks in an 80x25 terminal with amber or green on black text.

If you REALLY want to read Slashdot at work...

[patio11]

... just mosey on over to www.ghostzilla.com, install it, and then put the browsing window in a contextually appropriate app window on your screen. My bosses totally don't care what I do on company time as long as I meet my deadlines, but if they did and I were feeling sneaky I might, say, integrate the window into an Eclipse panel...

Re:Turn in Slacker Credentials at the Door

[bill_mcgonigle]

nice. Makes me blind, but nice. :)

Re:I agree. The runner-up seems FAR better.

[FireFury03]

oh FFS - text based browsers in 2006?

absofuckinglutely stupid

Why is it stupid? I frequently use eLinks because it's a whole lot faster than firing up a graphical browser (why exactly do I need graphics in order to read text news stories?).

I've also found myself using Elinks in an 80x25 console on a machine while waiting for it to install a Linux distro - it certainly helps pass the time. Not to mention those times when I've had to go searching for drivers/configuration/whatever which I needed in order to

Re:I agree. The runner-up seems FAR better.

[FireFury03]

You should try reading your journal [slashdot.org] 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.

Re:I agree. The runner-up seems FAR better.

[Neologic]

He probably wasn't referring directly to the bigoted part of your journal comment, again, you need to stop and think more deeply about things before posting, because it you are certainly not engaging your brain before using the keyboard (wasn't that something else in your journal?)

Anyway, I think that he was referring to your comments about holding slashdot users as more intelligent than the rest of the population and that you were shocked to see immaturity and ignorance displayed here. The vehicle that

Re:I agree. The runner-up seems FAR better.

[FireFury03]

I don't see why it would be difficult to have multiple versions of the site, one of which could be a text browser-friendly one (didn't there used to be a twin page like that?).

Having multiple versions of the site starts to become a administator's nightmare because of the overhead of keeping all the various versions working. Less of a problem when the content is all pulled from a DB like Slashdot is.

But this is what XSLT is for - serve up the content in XML and have the browser apply the XSLT stylesheet client-side. This has the added side effect of reducing bandwidth usage since you're not shifting the styling and layout data over the network every time the page is loaded.

The icky problem with XSLT at the moment, is that whilest all the mainstream browsers (even IE) support it, there's no way for the server to tell whether the browser is capable since there is no header the browser is required to set if it is.

In any case, if your web site doesn't work in both modern browsers and text browsers then you must be truely clueless when it comes to web design.

Use elements that are applicable to the *type* of content (i.e. tables are used to output tabular data, not to position random stuff on the screen. Menus can be presented as unordered lists, etc.). Then style those elements to give you the visual effect you need. Text-only browsers can discard the styling data and they still get to see the content - the correct use of elements gives the browser good hints as to how to display the data. Small-screen devices such as PDAs can select a different stylesheet.

And if you're expecting everyone to have Javascript then your site is very badly broken - Javascript-only features cause serious usability problems (for example, they may force someone to open something in a pop-up window when they don't want to). Javascript is an *enhancement* - build your site without it and then if you want to add *optional* enhancements then write some Javascript that modifies the DOM tree to add hooks to the right elements.

Interestingly, if your corporate website doesn't meet the W3 accessibility guidelines then (depending on your location) you may be breaking the law - many parts of the world have laws that prevent businesses from discriminating against the disabled. These often extend to corporate websites and large organisations have been sued for sizable chunks of cash for ignoring these laws.

Re:I agree. The runner-up seems FAR better.

[Richard Steiner]

Nope. I dropped lynx years ago. Links is a completely different text-based browser that shows things like tables and frames in a proper way, which makes some attempt to match text colors, and which (in some variants) also has a GUI display so images and other things are present just like they are in the Big Boys.

Here's an example of www.osnews.com being viewed by Links via PuTTY on a SunOS server:

http://www.visi.com/~rsteiner/links.gif [visi.com]

and the main project site is here:

http:// [sourceforge.net]

Re:I have to say

[4im]

Having a look at both the winner and the second using Firefox on Linux, the winner is definitely better looking than the second - the winner respects my font settings, while with the second many parts of the page are simply unreadably small. For that reason alone, there is simply no contest between the two.

Re:I have to say

[Bogtha]

the winner respects my font settings

No it doesn't. Take a look at the stylesheet [slashdot.org]. I quote:

font: 82%/150% Tahoma, 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans', Helvetica, Arial, clean, sans-serif;

If that respected your font settings, the first number would be 100%, not 82%. Since when is reducing your preferred font size by almost one fifth "respecting it"?

Perhaps if you have a small font size configured in your browser, it might not look very different to you, but the larger you've configured your fonts

Re:I have to say

[colmore]

Designers should have some flexibility with the display of text. Proportional sizing is a good compromise, far better than the much more common practice (I'm guilty here too) of just overriding things completely.

Re:I have to say

[Anonymous Coward]

C) read before you write


It may not be a democracy, but it is still slashdot.

Re:I have to say

[imaginate]

Really it *should* be put to a vote. We're the ones who have to live with it.

It's not like the editors ever read the site anyway... ;)

Re:I have to say

[digitalgiblet]

Here's a crazy thought. How about allowing each user to choose which way they want to see it. Slashdot could jump to the forefront of web-technology and market this ability as something totally new and original and come up with a new name for it like "skins" or "themes". They already have a "preferences" page.

I'm not sure the world is ready for such customizability, but slashdot should boldly step into the late '90s world of customization!

Are you nuts ?

[bigmouth_strikes]

Here's a crazy thought. How about allowing each user to choose which way they want to see it. Slashdot could jump to the forefront of web-technology and market this ability as something totally new and original and come up with a new name for it like "skins" or "themes". They already have a "preferences" page.

What do you think this is, 1999 or something ?

Idea stealer!!!

[scovetta]

That idea [slashdot.org] was good when I had it too, but apparently all we get is applause, and some references to using a Firefox extension.

And I still think it's a great idea.

Re:I have to say

[lpcustom]

How about just give us the ability to change the page style under View...Page Style...????I've seen this done via the slashcode website before.

Re:the ultimate design-by-committee

[Bloke down the pub]

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.

No it wouldn't.

Putting each individual feature of possible designs to an individual vote might.

Re:the ultimate design-by-committee

[sexyrexy]

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.

Re:the ultimate design-by-committee

[beaverfever]

saying the design is "poor" is a purely subjective

No, saying the design is poor is taking the things you mentioned into consideration, such as the form and function, and determining that the design performs poorly in both cases; therefore, the design is poor. It's not subjective - UI has been studied out the wazoo, and colour theory too. This is only Slashdot - I'm not going to submit a rationale.

I'm a bit surprised someone would say the second design is good from a colour theory standpoint. It is pasty gre

Re:Where?

[mizhi]

Ok, I give up. Where's the collapsable sections??

You have to click the section headers (don't click the Vendors link). It doesn't give you a very good indication that there's any sort of functionality hooked into those headers.

Re:Where?

[moresheth]

Right.

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.

Re:Where?

[geekoid]

If you ahve to explain where the collapsable section is, it is not a good lay out.

Re:Where?

[sehryan]

"It doesn't give you a very good indication that there's any sort of functionality hooked into those headers."

You mean, aside from the arrows?

Re:Where?

[Thuktun]

You have to click the section headers (don't click the Vendors link). It doesn't give you a very good indication that there's any sort of functionality hooked into those headers.

To many, this is an indication of bad design. (See affordance.) [jnd.org]

Of course, the "bad" in this case refers to usability for new users, not to the visual appeal of the page. The former often takes a second seat to the latter.

Re:Where?

[hackstraw]

In re collapsible sections, just realised you need not to be blocking Java, if you're using a browser with that capability.

I don't enable java by default, and it works fine for me.

Maybe meant JavaScript?

Big difference. JavaScript is OK (its part of the web), Java and other plugins are not.

Re:I have to say

[AnalystX]

Apparently. The biggest changes were just to the font and to use square corners.

Re:I have to say

[gregbains]

I prefer the new one, it is an update but not too extreme. Anyone got a link to the other entries so I can compare?

Re:I have to say

[packetmon]

I agree, the current look is something akin to historical and functional. The new look does not look that "new". Rounded corners were replaced by sharp edges along with a new font. How exactly does this qualify for a new look?

Re:I have to say

[DAldredge]

Changing the look is easier than improving the editing.

Re:And I have to say...

[timalewis]

No title. Less slick than Kuro5hin. Lame.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What is the comparison?

[ianscot]

Other than trolling for Mac fanboys, what are you talking about?

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?

Re:I have to say

[altstadt]

Or, rather, 8 pixel high sans-serif fonts are in fashion now.

Are all the "web designers" aiming for people running 640x480 screen sizes? The winner is close to illegible at 1280x1024 on a 19" CRT.

Re:I have to say

[billDCat]

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.

We all want to know!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

We all want to know what sort of laptop he's getting ;-)

(looks fantastic btw, job well done)

Re:We all want to know!

[Anonymous Coward]

P-P-P-Powerbook!

Re:We all want to know!

[daveschroeder]

From the original article [slashdot.org]: "The winner will get a fancy laptop. We haven't picked the exact one yet, but it's going to be a good one- we're not cutting corners. You'll be able to choose from a MacBook Pro or else a bleeding edge Alienware laptop. We'll pick the specs when we pick a winner so you get whatever is supremely awesome, but valued up to US $4500. We'll also be offering a $250 runner up prize."

Ugh

[donutello]

Blocky, too much wasted space and those same colors.

Well done

[KevMar]

That is a very crisp look. it still feels like slashdot, just fresh.

Congrats!

[Daveznet]

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.

I, for one...

[DebianDog]

Welcome our new CSS overlord, Alex Bendiken.

Re:I, for one...

[From A Far Away Land]

But does he run linux?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Alexes designing CSS templates for the web.

Nice, clean, simple. I like it. Guess I'll

[one_shooter]

steal it. Thanks.

Phew

[Alioth]

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.

Re:Phew

[Valdrax]

It showed up in mine (Avant which is an Explorer shell).
However, it took a few seconds to load; I'm guessing the site is slow. Did you give it a minute to see if it showed up?

It looks...

[Odin_Tiger]

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.

New, harder to read version

[Animats]

Yuck. The main body text is in a sans-serif font. Hard to read.

Re:New, harder to read version

[ems2]

Agreed. Check out the print css it is horrible. At least hide the login box with it!

Re:New, harder to read version

[JMemmert]

*chuckles* Quite the contrary. Or maybe not.
It seems that people have a much harder time reading sans-serif fonts on paper than serif fonts. On the computer screen, however, the opposite applies.
Here's a study about it http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt6/html-email-fonts.htm [wilsonweb.com] (Google is your friend).
And this is a quote from the Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif#Usage [wikipedia.org]:
"The coarse resolution of computer screens has caused a reassessment of the role of serifs in readability, with a large percentage of web pages employing sans-serif type for body text. Fonts with hinting information, anti-aliased rendering and the ClearType rendering technology has partially mitigated these concerns, yet the basic problem of coarse resolution--typically 100 pixels per inch or less--continues to impose strict limitations on readability and legibility on-screen." And yes, in the end, it boils down to personal preferences.

Re:New, harder to read version

[hackstraw]

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.

Downplaying the original CSS redesign

[Laebshade]

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.

Enh...

[jjohnson]

It's an incremental improvement in the look. Big deal. It's nice, but for this he gets a laptop?

Perhaps the problem here is editorial: Taco and the gang couldn't stomach a more radical departure from the old standby.

Changes?

[AKAImBatman]

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?

Personally, I'm a bit sad that Jason Porritt's design didn't end up in one of the top slots. (His design was the one who's mockup had the "

the preview version is missing images?

[Edgewize]

Compare the preview link to this PNG thumbnail from the author's website:
http://summit.makalumedia.com.nyud.net:8080/wp-con tent/uploads/2006/05/slashdot.png [nyud.net]

The images for all the rounded corners appear to be missing.

Re:the preview version is missing images?

[Edgewize]

Never mind, the slashdot server was just refusing to serve the images to me for some reason. It's fine. Please ignore the parent post!

Congrats on the slashdotting...

[FortKnox]

... hoping the price of the new laptop doesn't get exceeded by your bandwidth costs this month ;)

Huge ads

[Roadmaster]

It's OK, but on the demo page the ad is HUGE, and way too in-your-face. Takes a lot of valuable space. Please don't make the same mistake Yahoo! made with their non-flowing redesign; they say 1024x768 but that's the resolution I have and it still makes me scroll around, which is dumb because hey, I thought we'd all learned that fixed dimensions are bad!

still, good luck with the new design.

slashdotted prize

[davidesh]

here is a laptop you may promptly sell to pay for your bandwidth bill

I cut myself on the new slashdot

[binarybum]

looks, well, a hell of a lot like the "old" slashdot without the safety rounded corners.

A small Criticism

[Spinlock_1977]

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.

Re:A small Criticism

[gregbains]

I'm using Firefox 1.5 up to date and clicking the triangles for me opens and closes sections.

First thoughts

[lewiz]

Wow, I'm pretty impressed. I had absolutely no idea what to expect and I like the clean, polished look. It has kept the "Slashdot" while at the same time managing to bring the whole site right up to date.

Some people have already commented about wasted space... first off I don't think this is really true, it seems to be more down to the fact that everything is less "bendy" at the edges.

Well done on this, even the original icons fit in, although it would be nice to see these gradually phased out as more cle

Light mode?

[foo fighter]

What about the light mode?

I have Simple Design, Low Bandwidth, and No Icons checked in my preferences. This gives me a very streamlined, efficient way to read /. 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.

The winner's entry doesn't show this view of /. and I'm worried that it'll be removed as an option.

Please calm my fears! Tell me light mode will be part of the new look.

Re:Light mode?

[idonthack]

Don't worry. The way those prefrences work is by removing stylesheets. The contest is to redesign the stylesheets. You won't be affected because you won't load them anyways.

Looks ok

[fak3r]

Looks ok to me, I think the main thing is that Slash is moving on (FINALLY) to some new standards. I use things on Digg like the thumbs up/thumbs down buttons, and it's just one example of how things 'should' work nowadays, in regards to Web UI at least. I say "bring it on" and we can see what works, and hopefully, ways to improve it in a faster manner than in the past (Debian release comments anyone?)

I like it...

[ErnieD]

I like the design a lot. Very clean, still readable, and the clearly-indicated quoted sections are great. Very nice to clearly see what's quoted and what's editorial at first glance. Kudos.

pink was best evr !

[prettything]

i like this design but pink was best evr ! bring bak the ponies :) xx

Not very Web 2.0

[shish]

Where are the gradients? The rounded rectangles? The complete dependance on AJAX?

Slashdot'll never catch up to digg at this rate :(

Lipstick on a pig

[ruiner13]

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.

Hoping for something new

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

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.

not that pretty..

[nuzak]

But at least it's using CSS throughout, so it can be customized more easily. The current CSS use is quite haphazard, so while this new look isn't very impressive on the surface, it's a vast improvement underneath.

Please don't force a font on us...

[bziman]

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.

Too Busy

[corby]

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.

Re:Too Busy

[corby]

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.

Re:Too Busy

[Solokron]

I am going to have to agree with this. The runner-up looks a bit superior and more pleasing to the eye. A multi-million dollar company and the guy gets a simple laptop and gift certificate for the facelift of the Slashdot website? Although nice compared to most contests and effective obviously, I would expect a little more. I suppose its' weight in gold comes in listing it on a resume.

Thumbs Up

[Detritus]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Let us choose without signing in

[radarsat1]

I often read slashdot without signing in, doing so only for making posts.
Partly because it's more convenient, partly because.. you know, I don't always want to be signed in.

There's been a few comments about minor preferences, such as whether the body uses serif or sans-serif. These kind of things should be easily customized without having to sign in.

So: It would be nice if there was a way of choosing a style sheet or changing minor preferences by specifying it in the URL, so I could simply bookmark it. For example: http://www.slashdot.org/?style=ponies&font=serif [slashdot.org]

I mean, would it be THAT hard to do?
I see why it's necessary to choose a good, simple default design, but it would be fantastic if it was possible to bookmark your favorite stylesheet this way, being able to choose from a large catalogue of people's designs. Imagine every user could register designs and you could choose someone's stylesheet by specifying it in the URL: http://www.slashdot.org/?style=user_radarsat1 [slashdot.org]

That way people would be submitting new designs all the time, it would be a great way to generate some creativity on the site.

I dunno..
Anyways, just an idea.

Nice... but big.

[strredwolf]

I've seen the two designs that came one-two... and they're not quite space efficent.

Take the winner and compare with the origional. The origional is tight... some say too tight. There is little or no spacing around the non-story text (titles, menus, etc).

The winner is very like the origional, except that the spacing around the titles, menus, basically everything that isn't story text, is very loose. The spacing is much much larger, and wastes screen estate IMO. It's unfortunately also rather plain, plainer than the origional.

Now take the runner-up. It takes all the browser width, which is popular in most sites now. It has a better spacing around the non-story text, but still could use some tightening up. It also looks much better -- it has the shiner look.

I think being tighter (more like Google's GMail) yet stylish, will help.

Why not UTF-8?

[giafly]

I like it - good looking design.

• But why "charset=iso-8859-1"? Wouldn't UTF-8 [wikipedia.org] give better World Language support?
• Why pngs and gifs?
• No behaviors [w3.org]?
• And it's a long time since I saw script [slashdot.org] without error trapping.

You guys have obviously never been hacked.

Buttons look cramped in Opera 9 beta 1

[MagicM]

The text on the buttons looks a little cramped in Opera 9 beta 1. screenshot [imageshack.us]

Judging by the comments...he got it right

[gevmage]

Reading through the comments on this forum so far, looks like Rob got it right. About 1/3 like it a lot, about 1/3 think it's good but they're reflexively resistant, and about 1/3 sounding like country music singers and how they "long for the old one". :-)

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.

The winner's design is missing a lot

[nahorniak]

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.

One SERIOUS problem...

[evilviper]

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!

eg.: http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/7969/slashdot0f r.png [imageshack.us]

Fix that one issue, and I won't complain much. It will be a big improvement over traditional /. and much better than the runner-up, IMHO.

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!).

Re:It looks kinda like gnome

[Valdrax]

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.

Re:look good to me

[Dr. Eggman]

Seconded. Its a very nice look; very well proportioned. It looks really... umm, sharp! Seriously, it looks like i'll get a computer cut from it.

Re:I just redesigned my house.

[yagu]

All true. I wasn't necessarily lashing out. I sometimes am frustrated by attention to things, as you put it, "not broken".

So, when there are things potentially needing fixing I'd rather see energy spent there. I haven't gotten mod points now for well over two years. Turns out, after being laid off from a job of 21 years, my available extra time to be MORE active on slashdot pushed me past +1 sigma in the slashdot activity -- slashdot picks modders from the norm.

Considering I do alright in my karma, et

Re:"read more" link

[Solder Fumes]

100% agreement here, move the Read More link back to where it was. On my 22" monitor I have to move at least 12 inches to get from the sidebar to the Read More link.

Re:Teen Girl Squad:

[WilliamSChips]

ARROWED!