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...