CmdrTaco's Journal: First Batch of Slashdot Redesign Contest Notes

As I said in the original story, I woul be posting and commenting on some of the designs as they came in, and posting them into my journal. I have a few of these right now, and I'm posting them so I can give some guidance to everyone on what is good and bad.

I've had probably 15 or so "Real" designs submitted. Half were (ahem) bad or just not at all what I'm looking for. What follows is a couple of them They aren't necessarily the best, but each has a few things about it that I like that i thought was worth sharing to help give everyone guidance.

first I have a design from Sujay Thomas. I like that this design is CSS. I think the handling of the topic icons in the corner is a bit clumsy. I think the margins are a bit excessive. I think the bars on the left and right need a bit of work. But I think the center column is clean, simple and very readable. I don't think that this design will win without some work: i think it might be to minimal for what I'm looking for. It's also a bit high contrast for my tastes.

Next up I have Hallvar Helleseth's design. Now he is missing a lot of navigational elements, and I'm not sure what the 0-1-2 thing is behind the topic icons, but the design itself is a dramatic departure from Slashdot today, and I respect that. He tries something unique with the topic icons. I'm not sure that the earthtone color scheme is quite what I'm looking for, but I give him huge props for going somewhere unique. The 'More Slashdot' button atop the page shows you some ideas for where he is going with navigational elements. I think the left and right sides of the pages need a bit more differentiation, and there are a few missing elements that aren't properly classed, but this is another solid starting point. I like the reflection on the logo.

Dan Theman's Entry is just plain funny.

The final entry I will comment on today is a design from Philip Dhingra. First off, it is worth noting that his entry is a jpg- far from the CSS that I hope to ultimately see winning. His article space is clean and legible. Good choice on the data formatting. Moving the department line is interesting. His handling of the topic icons is unique, and a nice way to get around the limitations the icons present. He loses a few bits of information (story section for example) and explicitly labels the icons- I'd prefer not to label the icons. I want them to visually stand by themselves. I'm not sure about his left hand menu. But hsi choice to put the user information in the upper right hand corner is solid. It makes excellent use of the space. Likewise, his clean handling on the right of the slashboxes is really cool. Of the designs presented today, this is the most developed in terms of "Design" but the least developed in terms of "CSS". But I can't wait to see where this one goes.

a few random notes

so far nobody has tried a CSS expanding/contracting menu for the left hand side. Given the huge amount of space the menu takes up, I'm kind of surprised.

WRT the topic icons at the TOP of the page- I think that those are expendable.

WRT topic icons, tons of people suggested automated ways of converting them to pngs and such. Others suggested contsts seperate from this one to convert them. I'm open to anything, but as I stated originally, I think working with the icons we have is the most sane plan. But all my rules are flexibile here.

Most of the designs so far have really shrunk down the logo in the top left. I think thats fair: it's pretty huge right now and probably could use a trimming. Get the readers to the articles faster.

I have a lot more designs in my inbox that I plan to post here and comment on during the upcoming days.

Change the topic icons

[Devil]

I think someone really needs to take a stab at redesigning the topic icons as well, even if there are 150 of them. The whole "Bill Gates = Borg" thing as a Microsoft icon is just old. It's so... 1997. There are lots of great designers out there who could do it.

Re:Change the topic icons

[CmdrTaco]

I am not opposed to rebuilding the icons. I just think that doing so is a bit ambitious at this point. Personally I love the Bill/Borg icon. I'd love to see a newer/cleaner icon but I think after 8 years, it's classic.

Small Screen Viewing CSS?

[Dark Coder]

For people who have handheld computers, particularly GSM wireless handheld, they suffer the 'true' slashdot effect when trying to download and then read the entire content into ONE VERY LONG but NARROW strip of browser viewport that is symphomatic with handheld's small screen width (typically less than 320).

Can we submit such a CSS design format for this unique category?

Re:Small Screen Viewing CSS?

[CmdrTaco]

You are welcome to submit updates to any of our templates at any time. Not having a web enabled phone, I'm not very helpful about testing these sorts of things. Unfortunately this particular contest is not about the handheld template. Oddly enough, I get a furious e-mail from a reader who basically told me I was evil for redesigning Slashdot because apparently they thought that I was REMOVING the handheld templates. Wierd.

Removing?! What handheld template?

[Dark Coder]

I highly doubt that Slashdot.Org have a handheld template (at least for a BlackBerry).

Can you kindly submit a useful starting URL in which one can go about designing a CSS for this purpose?

Re:Removing?! What handheld template?

[CmdrTaco]

A simple view source will show you whate templates we have available currently on Slashdot. Right now we have a print template also, and the handheld template is handheld.css [slashdot.org].

It's never been tested on a crackberry internally. I don't have one. I wish I did.