Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
User Journal

Journal CmdrTaco's Journal: Slashdot Redesign Contest Continued 60

Journal by CmdrTaco
As promised, a few more of the redesign entries that have flown through my inbox are presented here today for you. Once again these are not necessarily the best entries, but rather I'm showing them to you guys more because they have things I think are worth commenting on.

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This discussion has been archived.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

Slashdot Redesign Contest Continued More

Slashdot Redesign Contest Continued

Comments Filter:
  • I don't remember seeing the green color scheme as being a parameter for the CSS redesign contest - so I'm curious if anyone has offered a design using a different color scheme?

    Maybe something in a nice color of blue?

    • Hmm, change is good and blue is my favorite color actually; however, isn't that green color emblematic of Slashdot? It'd be nice to keep it in the design somehow--even if it's just a passing reference to it. You always knew someone had slashdot up when you saw that green color (which I always happened to like BTW, although I've grown a bit tired of it).

      I guess what I'm saying is, go for change, but remember the past. ;)
    • I personally thing a color or logo change would be a drastic failure. There are only a handful of companies/organizations that have been able to successfully change their logo or color scheme. Most who try end up losing quite a bit of business (or readers) in this case. I 100% believe the color scheme should remain close, as well as the slashdot logo/font. Therefore Peter Lada's design is my favorite so far (excpet the logo change). I think this contest should be one to just clean up the design. Anythi
    • I don't remember seeing the green color scheme as being a parameter for the CSS redesign contest

      Retains some sense of visual continuity with Today's Slashdot - This one is the real challenge I think. From the Slashdot 'Shade of Green' (#006666) to the curve on the upper left hand corner of the page & article headers, to the use of the Coliseo font, I really think that many of these design elements need to persist. You are welcome to ignore me of course. But I'm being totally up front about this point: t

    • Taco said he liked the green in his original post. Didn't say you couldn't use a different colour, but strongly suggested that he wanted a design that used the same shade of green (and the curve).
  • As I understood the guidelines, you wanted a CSS/image redesign. Some of the highlighted redesigns have modified HTML or make heavy use of javascript for fancy menus. How willing are you to consider designs that require javascript for full menu functionality?
    • I'm curious about this as well. I understand that the scope given was vague on purpose (to elicit creativity, I'd imagine) but some tighter guidelines would be helpful. Should the ultimate goal to get as far as we can using just a new style sheet? -Xy
      • Personally, I think you are right on with that.

        Slashcode's been converted to html4/xhtml. Slashdot's theme's been converted to html4 too.

        If the current templates/css have been div'd up/classed up enough such that you can create an entire new look for Slashdot just by a) swapping the css and possibly b) swapping out the topic graphics/logo for new ones then I would think that's the cat's meow.
    • from a webdesign standpoint, imho, any site that requires javascript just to use the site, sucks.
  • Peter Lada's design is very clean and polished. But it seems like only a minor revision to the existing design. That'd be a good first step if you want to consider just going to a clean CSS version of the layout and then do radical stuff later on. IMHO, his design is good, but not something I'd vote for.

    (I'm of the opinion that you should have multiple layouts available and let folks choose what they like, but you've probably already been contemplating that).

    Phil's design is ok. The menus are a good step fo
  • I don't know CSS so I cannot enter this myself, but I knwo that one of the things that I've seen in comments is the differentiation between stories that make the mainpage and those relagated to the section pages. Has anyone thought of incorporating the type of technique used by tenbyten.org [tenbyten.org]? So you would essentially have all the headlines lined up on the main page, and then as your mouse moved onto it it would expand to show the summary. This would make the seciton preferences more useful because then yo

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday May 01, 2006 @12:16PM (#15237682)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • My favourite of today's submissions is Phil's [beautyoftheweb.com]. I like the fact that the menu is on the top and you don't need to scroll to see the whole menu. Drop downs are also a good idea. It reduces clutter on the web page. I like how each article is enclosed in the rounded box but I don't really like the navigation links between the story. They are distracting. It might be possible clean it up if you use a different colour but I don't know how much it adds and it could be removed entirely (IMHO).
  • This may be jumping the gun a bit, but for those designing CSS to plug straight into the existing site, it would be cool to have those entries setup as an alternate style sheet. Don't think IE supports it, but firefox users could pick what style sheet they wanted to use, and evaluate the main page that way.

    Just a thought.

    -KPW
  • I like Phil's design because it feels to me like an evolution of the current Slashdot design that has been around forever. I'm not a web dev and don't really care about how "pure" it is from a CSS perspective though.

    IMHO you shouldn't ruin a good thing. The current design has a certain campy cheesyness that is key to the why /. is slashdot.
    • What I like about Phil's design is that it zooms up really well. One of the thing I use the most in Firefox is the ability to increase the text size until the fonts in a webpage are nice and fat. I use high resolution (high DPI) screens which tend to make everything small and hard to read. IE will only let you increase the size in two small steps, and is broken by many websites that specify font sizes in pixels (morons).
    • I like Phil's the best. It is actually quite beautiful. Definitely the easiest on the eyes.

      I agree with other criticism about the "sub-links" to other sections. Perhaps changing to border-top: 1px might dial it in. Or maybe changing background-color: to a lighter hue and setting border-top: 0px; Just some thoughts from the peanut gallery.

  • DHTML (Score:3)

    by nahdude812 ( 88157 ) on Monday May 01, 2006 @12:34PM (#15237868) Homepage
    At first glance, it looks like a couple of these designs are using DHTML to drive their menus and such (though some of them could also perhaps be done with css:hover).

    Please don't make it so that DHTML is required to use the navigation, ok? One of the things I fight at work is my customers feeling like they need DHTML to have a successful web page. I have always been able to point at Slashdot and say, "See, content is more important than snazzy DHTML."

    That said, I have no problem with DHTML, so long as the page totally works without it.
  • ...is completely broken in IE7b2.
  • http://www.isujay.com/slashdot/ [isujay.com]
    I like this one, though perhaps a little less black, and the top green bar is a little big (height).

    http://beautyoftheweb.com/slashdot/ [beautyoftheweb.com]
    Again, like this one too. Really like the drop down menus, and like the sections at the top.
    Note: main boxes cover up the right hand boxes in Opera 8.

    http://mofus.com/slashdot/HomePage.html [mofus.com]
    OK. like the way the story icon images are half in with the text. Don't like the fact that each story heading is preceeded with the section it is i

  • Hmmm (Score:2)

    by linvir ( 970218 )
    Most of the posted designs have some cool stuff in them. But they also give me this feeling of "Ooh, I wouldn't like it if they applied that right away". But then I squeeze my objectivity hat onto my head (where else?), and realise that I'd say the same about the current Slashdot design if it hadn't been like that since the beginning of time.

    By the way, I can't believe you actually wrote "teh"! Dude, that's like, the forbidden mistake, guy!

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The same "problem" has existed for posting stories, as well.

      Technically, for JE's and stories, you really should be starting the first paragraph out with _something_, and that most likely is a p tag.

      The problem is a starting p-tag in an introtext didn't jive very well with slashdot's (and slashcode's) designs. The older stories didn't always start out with any tag, at all. The story, and journal, edit interfaces don't necessarily force, nor fix, proper html tag structure.

      Though, I think there's code that'll
  • I think his designs looks very clean, and "sharp." My biggest problem with Slashdot's Current design is that the spacing between many of the elements, the fonts, the styles, etc, seem rather inconsistent. Phil's design is very consistent and still looks very similar to the old Slashdot. I think that design will please many who have been waiting for a design change, without pissing off those who like the current design.

  • Mirrors (Score:3)

    by belg4mit ( 152620 ) on Monday May 01, 2006 @06:27PM (#15241037) Homepage
    Couldn't you at least post mirror links for the poor guys? It hardly seems like you
    can apply the same "we can;t do that" reasons for articles to solicited content.
  • I prefer usability over design. The current /. site is unusable on a Blackberry browser (and probably other handhelds as well). First, all the ads, menus and sidebars come first (I am sick how many times I have scrolled past 'the equation that changed the world'). Then when you find an interesting article, you cannot read the comments ('you are forbidden to view that page'). If I can't read the comments, I can as well read digg.
    • This brings up a good point.

      The stock slashcode theme/code includes handheld.css. I know when that was first being done, I was testing/helping a little bit with it on my Dell Axim pda. The last time I used it, w/ the lite mode options and all that the ostg 'crew did, Slashdot worked beautifully with my pda.

      Do any of you know of any apps that will "virtualize" how a PocketPC, blackberry, palm, etc, pda will render an html page?

      I would love to make my sites more accessable via pda's. But testing my sites with
  • Nearly all of the designs have gradients. This would be an absolutely awful thing to see on Slashdot.
  • One thing I think can be said for the current design is that it's quite easy to read -- which IMHO is the most important thing.

    Seems most of the other designs focus on things that distract from the comments (the entire reason I come to /.) rather than enhance their readability.
  • I'm really impressed with how fast everyone is working. I had about 15% done [see link below] when he posted his first round of entries, and totally gave up. http://floam.sh.nu/slashdot/slashfloamey.html [floam.sh.nu]
  • I like how two of the designs moved the search box to the top right and got rid of the topic icons. I never use the icons, and hate having to scroll all the way to the bottom to search. I also liked how one design consolodated the side entries into a pull down menu, it seemed much more organized.
  • I can really see the appeal of submitting a JPG here, though. I mean, given the odds of being chosen, I don't have enough time to work on developing a design idea into a fully-fledged CSS layout. Any designers out there will know what a bitch that stuff can be, before even going into cross-browser compatibility, so unless I know my design has a good chance (in which case I'd begin developing it in css/xhtml), I'd submit a jpg.
  • Peter's design is nice, but there are some rendering problems on screens smaller than the 1024x768 he must have tested on. For example, headlines overlapping bylines when the headline wraps.
  • Phil's design is teh hotness. I love it. It's not too far removed from Slashdot's current design, but it's a big step forward.

    -Waldo Jaquith [jaquith.org]
  • Rob:

    It occurred to me while reading through your comments and paging over to the entries that perhaps you might be wanting to stay too close to home with the new design. One of my recommendations in this regard would be to get a little more "gutsy" with your judgments. I can appreciate the necessity of some ground rules and the non-changeable nature of some slashcode components, as well as the comfort level that comes along with choosing a new design that closely resembles the old, but that may negate the
  • Only one design has made me go hmmmm. Neeld Tanksley's: http://mofus.com/slashdot/HomePage.html [mofus.com] I like how clean it looks, and with the creative flair that makes it look like a decent site redesign. A little tweaking in the story area could be done, but over all it looks the best.
  • And how they'll look on lynx? Don't forget we are geeks, remember to try on text browsers.

    And get some support when chosing a new designs, serifed fonts are bad to read, and italic are awful.
  • One thing to remember about slashdot is that many people coming here might not be using the latest and greatest hardware to view the site.

    Personally, at work I have Windows (ugh) or Solaris 8 running on an ultra 10 with a 300Mhz CPU. I prefer the Solaris machine over the Windows box for most of my work and have Firefox running nicely under Sol8. But. Its slow. All of the DHTML/Javascript heavy designes redraw REALLY REALLY SLOWLY on this machine. All of them except for Peter Lada's design that is.

    Lada's des
  • I don't think you should be picking on people for sending in jpegs. Maybe they don't want people stealing their code at this point in the game.
    • Creating a crossbrowser compilant CSS means a lot of work, at least for me. In the end only one design will make it. I'd rather see people spending their time on figuring the design out instead of trying to get the css to work. For the same reason though, I can see why taco'd prefer a finished css design. Plus, it's nice to say that I will css it if I win -- if i can really do it will remain unknown until then.
  • I'm 100% backing Neeld Tanksley's design, for what my word is worth. It's smooth, it looks wonderful, it adds variety while not departing from the overall theme, and it's easy on the eyes. The quote thing totally rocks, and the topic icons look wonderful. The whole thing looks great.

    Peter Lada's design, while obviously talented, strikes me as having a lot of hard edges and too much gray. It's also very wide on my display (1280x1024) The solid green line displaying the "whatever-you-call-it dept" string

  • icons (Score:2)

    by mabu ( 178417 )
    I think key to any redesign that strives to be new would be a total revamp of the icon system. I haven't read enough to see what the specs are for this project, but I feel that would be a major change that could have big impact on the site's impression. The existing icons are clunky. Someone could take the scheme and merely utilize a new set of icons that more smoothly integrate with the design and it would have a dramatic impact IMO.
  • one thing that concerns me with a lot of these designs is that they use really small fonts. while that's trendy and neat-looking, it's not an effective means of presenting text.

    please keep in mind that a browser's default font size is set for a reason. making the main text on a page (in this case, the article summaries) smaller than that only serves to make the page hard to read.

    so for what it's worth, i vote against any design that overrides my browser's default font with a smaller one.
    • Yeah, seconded. My favourite is seeing things like this:
      body {
      font-size: 0.9em;
      }
      Which is like saying, "I think everyone has their default text size set too high".
  • I can't help but think the last entry (Peter Lada's) looks like a domain-squatter page. It's completly non-descript and so without notable visual features it might as well be the webpage equivalent of Lorem Ipsum. But maybe that's just me.
  • What the deal with wanting animated/collapsable menus? They don't offer anything and just make it harder to use.
    • I don't know that I agree they don't offer anything. I think it depends on the website.

      If you've got a huge site, that has many levels deep of information, then breakout/pulldown menu's can help a user's understanding of the layout as well as make it easier for them to find something that's buried. It cuts down on the # of page views your site would probably get too. Which, for an ad-based website like slashdot, doesn't seem like a wise choice.
      • Well, I'm talking about this site, specificly. And if ads exposure is an issue, then I don't think AMD would appreciate having there link hidden. It's not like there is isn't much space down the LHS.
  • hi, some of the designs seem to use px instead of pt for font sizes - don't! i have 120 dpi here in front my eyes and although i can zoom in quite easily with opera i don't want to.. use pt and use a reasonable size please! PAT

Slashdot Top Deals

"We want to create puppets that pull their own strings." -- Ann Marion "Would this make them Marionettes?" -- Jeff Daiell

Close