The Slashdot Redux May 30th, 2006 by Alex
In early May I learned about the redesign contest at Slashdot, the tech website we’ve all come to love over the years. Still running on confidence gained in the winning of another redesign contest, I decided to give it a shot.
As a long-time Slashdot reader myself, I had a good feeling about the characteristics of the winning design. First, Slashdot’s brand and identity are closely married to its huge, loyal and long-time community. A redesign of Slashdot must be evolutionary, not revolutionary. Secondly, Slashdot presents a huge amount of information. A redesign should address the accessibility and usability of this information architecture. Finally, Slashdot operates on a budget. To allow for a fast and cost effective transition, a successful redesign should leverage its existing markup to the greatest extent possible.
With those design targets, I sat down for nearly 48 hours straight, and came up with the winning entry, presented below:
Over two hundred people submitted designs, from which Rob Malda picked three finalists. Be sure to check out the great designs by Peter Lada and Michael Johnson.
A more thorough article, discussing the decisions and compromises made during the design process, is in the working. Grab our feed and you will be the first to hear about it!
UPDATE:
Here’s a sneak peek of some more screens to tide you guys over until the new design is published:
If you’re an adventurous Firefox 1.5 user, you can also install the Greasemonkey script (developed by my brother, Arto) that allows you to try out the live Slashdot site using my design. Get it here.
May 30th, 2006 at 8:03 pm
Congrats! Nice work!
May 30th, 2006 at 8:16 pm
Let me be the first to say congrats on winning the contest!
I’m going to be seeing a lot of your new design :)
May 30th, 2006 at 8:18 pm
Right on dude.
May 30th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
Excellent job, Alex. I can’t wait until I’m able to browse Slashdot using your simple, yet elegant, design. Keep up the good work.
May 30th, 2006 at 8:28 pm
Good job. A lot of the slashdotters are slating it, partly because many of the images aren’t loading (I presume because slashdot is being slashdotted, as the new images aren’t in anyone’s caches), partly because many techy people don’t understand design (I’m one of those :-) and partly because they fear change.
I think you identified key criteria for the redesign and met them well. Looking forward to reading slashdot with your new design.
May 30th, 2006 at 8:32 pm
Congrats Alex! Looking forward to continuing to work with you on more of my sites.
May 30th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
Keep up the great work! Please post photos/specs of your new laptop when you get a chance.
May 30th, 2006 at 8:52 pm
Hey! I love your new Slashdot design!!
Great job!!
Congrats!
Kris
May 30th, 2006 at 8:57 pm
congrats on the /. redesign!
May 30th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
Congrats!
And I guess you just earned yourself some nice PR as well! :P
May 30th, 2006 at 9:10 pm
I really like what you’ve done. It still has that slashdot feeling. My biggest gripe with the previous site was that the typography was realy, realy bad. You’ve managed to clean that up perfectly, and it shows. I also like how its not over-designed, everything nice and clean.
This is one of those designs that will stand the test of time.
Congrats!
May 30th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
Some of the page elements feel a little padded, but overall it works really well — congrats!
May 30th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
Excellent work Alex — I’m really proud of you! :-)
May 30th, 2006 at 9:16 pm
Congrats, bro! With the effort you put into this, I was pretty confident of the outcome :)
Whew, so far our makeshift cluster is holding up very well under the combined assaults of the Slashdot, Digg and Reddit effects. Knock wood…
May 30th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Well done, looks good and we hope you enjoy the new laptop ;)
May 30th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
Great job on the redisign but you may want to read:
http://www.no-spec.com/?page_id=38
May 30th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
i liked the left menu for Peter Lada’s design. it loads faster when you hover over the links. Kind of got annoyed with how an hour glass showed up everytime i hovered over the left menu links for Alex’s design. Just my opinion…
Great job guys.
May 30th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Very good work, friend. I read ./ every day and I really applaud your design. I think it makes the site much easier on the eyes and gives it a much needed modernization!
May 30th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
Good work. I don’t know if you can change anything still, but might I suggest you take a look at the page through an 8bit colour viewer like VNC and see if you can tune things a bit for that. I’m finding that the article comment links and numbers are half on a dark colour bar and half on a light one, making them harder to read without a uniform background.
Congrats on winning.
May 30th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
Congratulations, Bro!
My brother Alex has just won the Slashdot redesign contest! Have a look at the official announcement and Alex’s blog entry.
The contest was announced a month ago, and has garnered wide interest in geekdom, not to mention a huge number of submiss
May 30th, 2006 at 11:00 pm
Congratulations, Alex! :) I can almost picture you on your marbella villa in some years! :)
May 30th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
Thanks for the kudos guys!
As chrisbtoo pointed out, it’s too bad the design was broken for a while after the announcement was posted on Slashdot. All you people who critized it for the lack of rounded corners and gradients, go have another look ;-)
I added links to a few more templates at the bottom of this blog post, check ‘em out.
Thanks for the congrats, Tim ;-)
apache: Oh, you bet I will post some photos and maybe even a mini-review of the laptop. Let’s see if those Macbooks really get as hot as people are claiming.
Rob: I’ve seen a lot of redesign bashing lately (Andy Rutledge comes to mind as an example) and that’s a subject I plan to address on this blog in the near future.
Johnny: I haven’t noticed that before – what browser/platform are you using?
Saskboy: That’s one aspect I didn’t come to think of testing :-) Nonetheless, with a target audience like Slashdot’s, I’m sure you’re not the only one using an 8 bit color profile, be it with VNC or not. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I can influence it anymore.
Hey Carlos, nice to see you here and thanks for the congrats as well.
May 30th, 2006 at 11:51 pm
That’s pretty gorgeous without being too too extravagant. Good work. This should just about be all it takes for you to be huge in this industry for the next few years at least!
As for me, I might hang out more at Slashdot now that it’s about to stop being hideous.
May 31st, 2006 at 12:59 am
A minor quibble: the “news for nerds, stuff that matters” in the header image is rendered with RGB subpixel antialiasing–which looks great on (RGB-ordered) LCD screens, but has the opposite effect on CRTs.
May 31st, 2006 at 1:33 am
Curtis: Thanks, I’m glad you like the new design :-)
Anders: I hadn’t realized that at all. As I stated before, the design is now out of my hands, but I will surely keep that in mind in the future. I personally know a lot of people who still refuse to switch to LCDs, so that’s not something to ignore, especially when it’s so easy to fix.
To address one complaint I keep reading over and over in the comments at Slashdot and Digg, namely that the new design looks too much like the old one: for me, that’s a sign I did something right, as my goal was to fix the problems in the design, within the constraints of the contest rules, and not to do a complete redesign just for the sake of being able to, if you catch my drift ;-)
Slashdot has a long history, and I think most people recognize the site from even a tiny screenshot. That’s something I definitely wanted to keep.
I will go into much more detail about the whole process in my blog post, which I plan to publish during the weekend or early next week. Stay tuned!
May 31st, 2006 at 2:50 am
Dude, you did one amazing job at this design. I loved it the most and I’m glad you got picked!
May 31st, 2006 at 3:25 am
Nice work… a definitely improvement over the current design. I’m looking forward to it being implemented.
May 31st, 2006 at 3:33 am
Very nice! keep it up
May 31st, 2006 at 3:43 am
Outstanding! Some of the other designs looked too “modern”. Basically, too trendy and cutting edge to hold up to the test of time. Your design, although using some modern elements, looks like it should hold its own against design trends for a while! :)
May 31st, 2006 at 5:59 am
Excellent redesign and congratulations on winning. What I love most is that it still feels like the Slashdot site everybody’s used to but it is much more readable. And it is what matters most in the end. Good job!
May 31st, 2006 at 7:09 am
Extremely simple.
I like it, & am waiting for it to go live.
Great job dude ! :) :) :)
May 31st, 2006 at 8:28 am
pretty nice work done man.
nice job done.
must Appreciate
May 31st, 2006 at 9:22 am
well done, nice work, takes a bit to load sometimes, but still very good
May 31st, 2006 at 6:48 pm
I wouldn’t say that it’s redesign bashing that’s going on — rather, it’s bashing spec work in the form of redesign competitions. With Slashdot, it’s a little different, since the site is essentially the community and viewers can get a good knowledge of the client, but overall it hurts the profession when these contests go out.
That’s not to say your work isn’t good. It’s solid work that really updates the Slashdot look and brings more impact to the identity. Excellent job.
May 31st, 2006 at 8:40 pm
Good work, Alex.
One idea: Make the Search button up at the top right of the site a formatted button to match your design. Seems to stand out quite a bit amongst the smooth gradients and layout of the rest of the site. This would be easy to implement.
All-in-all, a very good job!
June 1st, 2006 at 12:12 am
Nice design, I just wish that the article titles (on the main page) and the comment titles (on the article pages) were collapsible just like the sections on the left panel. Just a thought.
June 2nd, 2006 at 3:10 am
Postscript to the Slashdot Effect
The actual slashdotting is now well over, and I’m glad to say we weathered the storm without any incidents. With the help of our sysadmin, Niall, we distributed the load across three dedicated servers in geographically diverse locations, and none…
June 2nd, 2006 at 3:50 am
Gauging Reactions to the Slashdot Redesign
Alex’s win in the Slashdot CSS redesign contest has been making the rounds on the net.
S/D/R — The Big Three
Mere moments after the official announcement on Slashdot, the story made its way to Digg and Reddit. To date, Slashdot’s or…
June 2nd, 2006 at 10:38 am
[...] Så här ser nya Slashdot ut - ett redigt lyft! Vinnaren, Alex, har skrivit ett par ord om bidraget. [...]
June 3rd, 2006 at 11:47 am
Great work and congratz on the win ! cheers!
June 5th, 2006 at 4:09 am
[...] The Slashdot redesign contest has a winner. The redesign isn’t a huge change, which is usually a good thing. It’s just web 2.0-ey… so yea… It was free. [Insert furious argument about how doing spec work is horrible for design/photo/any creative business. Or read Andy Rutledge’s thrashing.] [...]
June 6th, 2006 at 8:58 am
New CSS at Slashdot…
Well no sooner do I start my new blog, looking for the opportunity to play with some css hacks I have been readin up on, then I see this cool news at zdnet, it seems that slashdot has updated it’s look and feel with new css over there!
…
June 7th, 2006 at 4:11 am
Slashdot redesign
I noticed the redesigned Slashdot website today. It looks much better now. Searched a little bit and it seems that the new CSS design was selected from a pool of user submitted designs. The winning design was created by Alex…
June 7th, 2006 at 5:41 am
Nicely done. A lesson in good CSS. :) :) :)
June 8th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
An excellent job on the redesign. It’s made reading /. a far more pleasurable experience.
June 9th, 2006 at 8:40 pm
My biggest gripe is the fact that Tahoma Italic doesn’t exist, yet Windows fakes it by slanting it in a most hideous manner. Italics are used quite often on Slashdot, too, for comments, book reviews and occasionally article text. So it’s kind of a big deal. At least you (or they?) fixed some of the other usability quirks, like the “Read More” being on the right and the illogically right-aligned comment score. It’s a nice design, but suffers from some pretty serious flaws.
June 12th, 2006 at 3:36 am
Awesome piece for your portfolio! You’ve got some pretty good bragging rights on this one.
June 15th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
[...] Well Alex’s winning of the Slashdot redesign contest is doing more for MakaluMedia sales than a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal. Which brings us back to Global Warming, and my email problems. [...]
June 30th, 2006 at 12:43 am
Nice work!
What are some of the good online sources that you freqquent to learn about design?
Thanks you!!
November 4th, 2006 at 3:13 am
Nicely done… I was wondering who did the Slashdot redesign.
January 9th, 2007 at 1:20 am
Really nice design. Slashdot looked like a pile of cr*p before.
Thanks, man.
April 4th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
Wow nice design!!
January 1st, 2008 at 9:06 am
[...] The winner for the Slahdot redesign contest says he sat down for 48 hours to create it, there are updates posted and several comments at Alex Bendikin’s blog post about it - check it out. [...]