Slashdot

The first design comes from Phil. As he has just one name, I shall assume he is like Cher or Madonna so I should just know him. His design doesn't do much with the header, but he experiments extensively with the menu. Breaking out the sections is a good idea I think. I'm not sure about moving the entire menu structure up top tho- I think it makes the page feel really wide. He uses a pull down menu system which I think has some potential. I'm not sure if instead we should put a pulldown menu on the side. The articles themselves are in newly styled boxes which work pretty well. I'm not sure if I like his abbreviated style- the really light green looks kind of weak against the much stronger greens of the titles and footers of the articles... and when you place 2 articles adjacent, you see that dark green line, then the white spacing, then the dark green bar of the next section. It's a bit much. I don't care for how he abbreviated the articles in the 'science' box. All in all, I think this design is solid, but it would take a lot of work to clean it up to be a true winner.

Jarques "Retro_X" Pretorius's design is only a jpg, so no thoughts on actual implementation. He once again moves the section list up top. Also he moves the seach box. A reasonable design decision. I sorta like how the topic icons look embedded into the center column. It makes them LOOK good... but as with so many designs, those topic icons just don't serve a lot of purpose. This isn't his fault- it's mine. The space populated by those icons was originally intended to house the advertising on Slashdot, but that space turned out not to work since ad styles need to chang so much. I think the left & right sides of this design uses white, light green, and 2 shades of grey as background colors. I think that's just to much. Again, there are a lot of really great ideas in here, but I think it will take work for it to be seriously considered.

Neeld Tanksley's design has a lot going for it. But chief among his design decision was to use to indent italics like a block quote. I think this looks nice, but it doesn't work consistently on Slashdot. Some stories might have 2-3 quotes... sometimes very short. So I think that it wouldn't work reliably, visually. I think the abbreviated article view gets lost here. I like his handling of the icons within the articles. They really look nice above the lighter shade of green, although I suspect some of the drop shadowed icons won't work. THe faded icon thing atop the page looks ok, but as with most designs, they really prove how worthless those icons are. The menu and the slashboxes are allright. Same for the header. There are again, many good ideas here.

Patrick Durst's Design is fully CSSd, and uses some itneresting ideas on teh side menu. I think with some work, hsi menu structure might work really well for Slashdot. Unfortunately I thin kthe rest of hsi design is sort of boring. His abbreviated article view is more interesting than his titlebar view. And the slashboxes on the right hand of the screen are just... well.. squares. Since his implementation is CSS, it's worth noting that his search box in the footer doesn't quite line up right. All in all, the menu on the left hand side is this design's strong suit, nad it's why I share this one with you. This design (as well as a few others today) are addressing our menu clutter problems in different ways. I think that this is a quite successful attempt. The onyl thing that DOESN"T work here is that only one menu stays open. I think we'd want Vendors, Services, and Sections at least open by default. Help, Stories, and About could be contracted by default since those are relatively unncessary for most users. Preferences/Login deserves special treatment.

Next, Adam Marsh's design is only as yet a jpg, but he's definetly trying stuff. The slash design element is carried throug hthe header and sidebar. It looks quite nice. I generally don't like to abbrevviate '/.' in punctuation form, but this design is solid enough to consider it seriously. I don't think the topic icons in the right corner works. Unfortunately this design drops topic icons from the articles entirely. I'm not opposed to that decision, but I do tend to feel like something is lacking. I'm not sure about the use of red for links, but I think it's ok. I've had probably a half dozen designs match slashdot's shade of green with orange. This is a better contrast I think.

the last design for today comes from Peter Lada and i think is one of the coolest we've seen. His handling of articles is elegent. While he doesn't deviate much in the left hand menu, I think it all looks really solid. His header is really minimal and I dig it. I miss the old Coliseo font, but his choice to drop the topic icons and move the search box up top is solid. I like his 'Old Stuff' box, as well as how he handled 'Book Reviews'. This is probably one of my favorite designs in terms of just plain 'Look'. It doesn't deviate very far from today's layout. That might be this particular design's weakness- other designs have gone further with good results.

I have probably 20 more designs in my inbox worth commenting on. But I'll save that for later.

Also, i'm letting readers comment in this journal entry. I've not allowed that before, so please be nice. I have infinite moderator points and have no problem using them in my journal.

updates addressing comments here so everyone reads them:

• I'm not immediately planning on offering multiple skins to readers. You can already do that locally by overriding local CSS. But I think that when a reader comes to 'Slashdot' it should look like 'Slashdot'. If you want to change that personally, go for it. But the official view ought to remain consistent.
• I agree that the topic icons in the top right corner are expendable. They are one of the few elements i nteh current design that are almost if not totally meaningless.
• CSS/DHTML/JAVASCRIPT/ETC. Whatever. Use whatever you like. When it comes time to judge, compatibility will be a factor, so whatever you choose, be careful.
• We are willing to make some changes to the core HTML. We are not willing to make drastic changes unless the idea is really fantastic. So adding a new DIV or something is no problem, but writing hundreds of lines of perl to generate some new data is not likely for the scope of this contest.