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Journal CmdrTaco's Journal: Slashdot Redesign Part III 44

Journal by CmdrTaco
Back again with a few more designs to share. Once again, these designs are shared with you guys to show you what people are submitting, not to show you who is "winning". THe contest is wide open. My comments here are for everyone to better understand what I'm looking for in a winning design... these designs may not be the best entries I've seen, but they have elements that I think are worth commenting on.

Jason's Design is a very strong example of a design that really tries to expand/clarify/simplify the Slashdot of today. His header is solid. The gradiant on the left hand menu is nice. His article layout is solid. The dynamic menu on the left hand side is an improvement on what we have today. I feel that his design has to many shades of green in it. THe slashboxes on the right are a bit dull, and that green titlebar used there (and on the left menu) doesn't quite match). I don't care for the gradiant on the 'slogan' space. I think that a bit more effort could be put into that space to make it look a bit cooler. Also there is no footer to speak of. Now I don't know if at the end of the contest the winner will be a design that breaks with Slashdot a lot, or echos it very strongly. But if I ultimately decide to go with the latter, this design has a lot going for it. Simple. Clean. Readable. Very well done.

Gregory's Design is perhaps even more tightly linked to the design of today. This design is pretty much entirely cosmetic. That is both it's strength and weakness. I like visually how he has made the left hand menu and right hand slash boxes jut a bit outside the main box. I like the look of his abbreviated articles. I don't like th elittle boxes around the footer menu. All in all I think the problem with this design is that it is simply to white. When you scroll down a few times, past the menus and boxes, it is not really visually distinctive. I think this is because his articles, while clean, lack a little pizazz... Ultimately tho, a design like this is very solid, but it makes me wonder why I'd change from what we have to this, since I don't think it breaks much from what we have.

Heath Huffman also changes very little in terms of layout. I share his design because he but some effort into the logo in the upper left hand corner. I think that's a nice look. I'm not sure if it' what I want- a 'newspaper' kinda rubs me in a print-is-dead kind of vibe. But I appreciate the look. The grid behind the articles... the binary behind the topic icons. I could go either way on them, but I appreciate the effort. The green/grey gradient just doesn't work for me.

Michael Johnson's design is still only a mockup, but it is a very strong design. A clean header echos Slashdot of today very strongly. Moving the login box up top is a smart decision. His menu is very solid. His article layout is very clean... perhaps to clean. Maybe green titlebars shadowed instead of the white ones 'carved out'. The real question for him will be how close can he get to this design in CSS. Truthfully this is among my favorite designs I've seen. It is very readable. Very attractive. Where he goes with it will be interesting...

John Reilly's design is another mockup. He shows some interesting stuff. Some of which I'm not sure he can translate to CSS. His design is unique in that he actually seperated the slashbox column outside the main frame of the stories. This is a cool design idea and looks really excellent. Unfortunately the advertisement space must be able to span the width of the browser... so if he were to align his slashbox column just below the ad, it would work technically. I think his logo is cool, but to tall vertically... Since he decided he wanted the menu up top, he chose to move the slogan down into that space. Unfortunately the topic icons are like 100 pixels tall, and his logo is really half that. I think it looks a little odd. He could drop the topic icons, rethink that space somehow, and have a really good base for an entry. It's worth noting that his articles are missing some data bits (dept line for example). But like several other designs we have, it's hard to judge a static mockup in the same way as you would CSS/HTML. I hope he continues to work on this.

Rafael Madeira's design is alas also a jpg. He slightly changes the slashdot shade of green, but I think it might work despite that ;) His design is aesthetically very pleasing. I'm not sure about his Log in box in the upper right hand corner. Like so many of these designs, that topic icon space is a real crutch to deal with. It's not very good on Slashdot today, and making it "Better" is often what is seperating the good entries from the best entries. He submitted several other pngs to demonstrate functionality, but I don't think they matter of my purposes here. He wants functions (Zoom, Fluid etc) that I don't think are that important... especially not given how often the average user would change them. I'm not sure preceisly what he plans to do with his 'sidebar shortcuts'. Since that whole space is user configurable, I think it probably would be best to just leave them there normally. Users who log in can delete/remove/add those boxes. My concern with this design is similiar to many others... if I scrolled down a couple pages, the articles would look generic. I think slashdot's articles today are quite recognizable. The green. The curve. The dept line. The topic icon. I'm not saying any of these elements are necessary, but the layout of these articles is clean... but just white and a very faint grey. I think more could be done there to add some energy to this design.

Phew.

Ok, with that, I have posted to this journal the entries I wish to share up to May 1. I have another dozen or so worth sharing still in the inbox, but I'll save them for later... in the mean time... keep the entries coming...

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Slashdot Redesign Part III More

Slashdot Redesign Part III

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  • The more I see of these designs, the more obvious it is that the green is just very hard to overcome. Some designs are really modern and innovative, but with the old /.-green it gets hard to actually see them as such.

    What is needed is someone with a good eye for colors that brings us a couple of complimentary colors to break up the green-ness a bit, not making it the only color.

    Apart from that, we've seen some terrific designs already.
    • The more I see of these designs, the more obvious it is that the green is just very hard to overcome.

      I guess that's the real challenge here: not only has the design have to be a good one, but it has to look good in Slashdot Green. The reason why it works in the old design is that it's been used quite sparingly. The reason why it doesn't work in many of the designs we've seen is because they've used it too much. Some have also used a lot of black, making their designs look more like the interior of an alie

  • jason's is the best (Score:3, Insightful)

    by an_mo ( 175299 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2006 @01:57PM (#15255553) Journal
    .. so far. All are laudable entries, but in the end I found none of them better than the current design. I saw one on the first day you posted (forgot which), and jason's today which is neat and readable. Most of the others are clearly inferior and borderline unreadable and cluttered.
    • I like Jason's the best but it does not scale well to the 800x600 notebook screen I am using. Grr.
    • Yeah, Jason's totally kicks ass. Nice work dude! Better than any of the previous round.

      Only thing missing is what do the "sub-topic" links look like?
    • As with many people, I really like this design. The HTML, however, seems to be largly rewritten in order to achieve some of the effects (like the drop shadows around the articles) that (to me with only moderate knowledge of CSS) just aren't possible with the way slashcode currently outputs html. Is this level of modification reasonable? If it is, IMO it significantly changes the scope of the contest. -Xy
    • If I have to read slashdot every day for the next few years I would absolutely implore that something like Jason's is taken on as opposed to the other entries. The dark green on black with stark white backgrounds puts more emphasis on the text as it is the only black. A lot of these designs are looking awful confusing and are just plain not as easy to read as slashdot currently is. A technique that would improve Jason's design further would be to have a collapsable right hand side bar that would use javasc

  • Getting better (Score:2, Interesting)

    by olavfb ( 971889 )
    The designs seems to be getting better by each time you post. But when will you get to my entry [bjorkoy.com]? ;)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Michael Johnson's design: this one really hit me when I looked at it. I liked it right off. I can see some room to improve, but it's very good so far.

    The page length will be dynamic, I'm sure, so the category icons could easily by seperated from the article text, or made smaller.

    It is very simple and lacks a lot of elements of the current slashdot, but if they could be nicely incorporated into the design, that would make it for me.

    Best one so far.
    • This design is great. But, I think it emphasizes the sections too much. The section info and the section icon should be over on the right-hand-side of each entry. Otherwise, it is too likely that the user will click on the links to go the section page instead of the story page. Plus, the icon gets in the way of trying to scan the summaries.

      Also, where would you put the slashboxes and the top banner ad in this design? I guess I would put the top banner ad between the header and the stories for effectiveness'
    • I agree. Neat and subtle. But I think I prefer the typefacing in Jason's -- very skillfully laid out. Michael should follow Jason's lead and add a touch more line-spacing. Say, 1.4 em or so.
  • I liked both Jason's Designs and Michael Johnsons. Both solid, but I get a better idea from the former b/c the other is a mockup.
  • I have to say, I have been very impressed with almost every design. The only thing I can knock is that a few of the designs seem to be targetting a specific browser resolution like 800 x 600. I think that these are mostly the mock-ups, which may be the problem. I think a blog-ish site like /. works best if it expands to whatever resolution. I think the designer can start at 1024 x 768, and test the design at that resolution and above. Most web traffic is at that resolution or above nowadays, and I woul
  • Many of these designs use italics in the main text area. While I don't think the slashdot site has poor readability currently, a new design relying on italics will seriously compromise the attention and enjoyment of your readers.

    I invite you to consider the example of the NY Times website which has recently undergone a redesign. One of the striking aspects of the facelift was the font change. The new fonts were obviously carefully selected in terms of typeface, size, spacing, kerning, etc. The new site was
  • Both Jason's and Gregory's Designs are my favorites.

    One thing that I'd like to make it to the final re-design is page width 'variability'. For folks with different monitor resolutions.

    One of the beauty about css is that you can make this happen.

    I did it with my personal blog (had to modify a wordpress theme that had a hard-coded width).
  • This is a very airy design, it lightens the experience. The use of Mac OS X like design might be a bit overused at the moment? Compared to the other designs it really shines. The runner up is Jason's, which share the clarity of the navigation and stories without feeling cluttered; like Gregory's and Heath's designs are sorry examples of.

    The slashboxes aren't there in Michael's design; which could be a good thing; he is also missing the top advertisment box. The slashboxes might or might not be valuable; wit

  • Jason's design (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ThatNuttyPeej ( 739121 )
    ...is magnificent. Please please please let's go with this. I see what you mean with the many shades of green, but I like the bold, clean layout.
  • ... see above.
  • Michael's and Jason's designs are both very nice, but they show their limitations when browsing them on a widescreen monitor. Michael's looks like it's stranded on the left of the page, and it may benefit from being moved to the center in its entirety. Jason may want to wide-proof his header so it doesn't split up. These are both just starting points, and as that they've both proven themselves very well.

    Michael's design crosses the threshold and changes the BGCOLOR to white. I'm curious what the introdu

    • I don't understand why people constantly gripe about colors. These are mockups, guys. The colors can be changed in a flash. For me it's all about layout, simplicity and how well the structure fits together. So long as someone gets that part right, the colors can be jimmied about any which way.
  • for using slashdot's RSS feed in a demo - it would be rather javascript-heavy, but you could do (optional) live updating that way. If comments were rss syndicated too, you could use that for the comments section. All the feeds along the side are indirectly via RSS too, so they too could be live updated. Might even cut down slashdot's mighty bandwidth usage :-)

    This is so I don't have to manually refresh /. 100 times a day, it does it automatically ;-)
  • What do you think?
    http://www.definitivelabs.com/clients/slashdot/ [definitivelabs.com]

    Added firefox tabs at the top and mixed the visual with other popular web2.0 websites.
    • What do you think? http://www.definitivelabs.com/clients/slashdot/ [definitivelabs.com]

      Well, I'm not Taco, but I like it, uses the green as a nice border for the overall site. The only thing I would suggest is maybe using black in the center to strengthen the contrast for the articles.

      Right now I would say the only iffy (if that) part of the design is that everything is green causing your eye to not know where to start to look. Maybe a black background with a white font style for the article title would help.

  • I'm not sure that the way this contest works is very fair.
    I mean, since the pretendents are shown as they arrive, and commented by Taco and others, if you start your design now for example you can pick what works in some submissions, and try to enhance from that.

    One could think that it's a good thing for the final design because it'll probably contains some of the best ideas of the previous one, and be better...
    But i'm not sure about that either, I think the comments and the way current designs are headed

    • To quote Cmdr Taco,

      Between now and then, I will try to post a few journal entries as I see good designs float through. I want this whole process to be as participative as possible.

      At the end of this time, I will pick a winner. I will be biased. I will be unfair. I will pick the design that I think is the best for Slashdot based on the criteria I mention above as well as my own personal sense of aesthetics.

      I'm pretty sure thats the way Taco wants it, he upfront admitted that he is not interested in

  • I think the search bar is the most neglected feature in most of these designs. We all know it was kind of tacked on to the bottom so as not to change everything, but most of these designs have continued to ignore it.

  • Minimalist (Score:2, Funny)

    by atchon ( 968296 )
    My minimalist design
    http://xthost.info/atchon/slashdot3.htm [xthost.info]
    criticisms would be greatly appreciated.

    • Friendly suggestion (honest): use JPG for photographs, and PNG or similar for other graphics. Your mock-up looks terrible on my screen, but more because the JPGs are wrecking all your text and precision graphics than anything else.

    • I'm not CmdrTaco, but my first impression is too much green! The grey and black on the present slashdot keeps us all from going insane. Please don't try to change it to an all-green all-the-time style.

  • In Gregory's design, the text in the left hand boxes spills over the box edge --- probably because I have a minimum font size set. Compare current slashdot, where the LHS grows as you increase the font size..

  • I think it is bad, that many designs removes many features, that are in the original design, and will probably be put back there. This includes tagging and these grey boxes in the article space. Naturally this makes the design look much cleaner compared to today and the other designs, but what will it help, if the features are to be put back?
  • Some of the designs submitted so far have some great potential. However I'm sure some others, including myself, will be submitting a design. I haven't seen an official date for the close of the contest so can we have one for the sake of managing our time?

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