Gauging Reactions to the Slashdot Redesign June 1st, 2006 by Arto
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 original announcement has garnered 852 comments. The Digg story has been “dugg” 1715 times and commented on 203 times, while at Reddit the story has gained 110 points.
While we have been receiving a constant stream of private congrats via e-mail, comments on all three sites cover the full spectrum from “love it” to “hate it”; the latter kind occasionally moving on to some disproportionately extreme reactions that may perhaps be a symptom of an excessive disconnect with Real Life(TM). Goes with the territory, and Alex is taking it all in stride, I hope. This much is obvious: had this been a vote, instead of CmdrTaco’s call, I doubt any single one of the proposed designs could’ve sustained a clear majority.
Unfortunately, what contributed to an initial negative backlash of sorts was the fact that when the story broke, the design preview was missing a number of elements, including the actual Slashdot logo itself. Slashdot staff quickly corrected the situation, but the posted comments show that a significant number of people thought the erroneous version was the final design, and were understandably upset.
The press release
OSTG’s press release was published on MarketWire, eventually being picked up by MSN Money as well. It includes this comment attributed to CmdrTaco:
“Alex Bendiken’s entry was selected because his design improved upon many shortcomings of Slashdot’s original design. His design moves commonly-used functions into positions of prominence, and improves the readability of articles. His entry required only minor changes to our core HTML, and breathes fresh life into a site that has remained aesthetically unaltered over its 8+ year lifespan,” said Slashdot founder and site director Rob Malda (aka Cmdr Taco).
Blogosphere reactions
The blogosphere has received the new Slashdot with open arms and an almost unequivocally favorable opinion:
- Steve Bryant posts on his eWeek blog that he thinks he Slashdot redesign “looks pretty damn good. Contemporary, but not so much that it’ll be outdated soon”. He also comments that “all of Google-dom is filled with the name Alex Bendiken” — well, actually, it’s only like 600 entries at the moment, but you, dear reader, are more than welcome to add your contribution to the growing number…
- John Gruber of Daring Fireball likes the new design, calling it “a big improvement that preserves everything that’s good about the classic Slashdot brand.”
- Rui Carmo of The Tao of Mac agrees with Gruber that the new design is “very slick indeed”.
- An editorial in PHP Magazine calls Alex’s design “very nice and well done”, while drawing on their own previous experience to add that it’s no easy task to satisfy everyone. How true…
- David A. Utter, staff writer at WebProNews, details the differences between the old and new designs, without neglecting the runner-up.
- Ryan over at CyberNet News blogs: “I believe that Alex really deserved to win. From the bunch of redesigns that I saw his was the best. He kept the integral parts that makeup Slashdot but he also implemented a slick interface.”
- Philipp Lenssen thinks the design “is cool. The font could be easier to read, tho”.
- Phil Crissman likes the new look, adding “I’m sure I’ll see a lot of comments along the lines of It’s the same, only different (true), you just added round corners/gradients (no and yes — they already had some round corners), and more such complaints. I’m of the opinion that it retains the characteristic slashdotness of the design, but manages to make it look current. Good job, I say.”
- Ronald Heft, Jr. states: “I personally love it. I’ve always hated the current design, and while the new one does resemble the current design, it greatly improves upon it. The site feels less jagged and seems like a more calming place.”
- Michael Angeles thinks the new design ” adds a good deal of white space around the margins by removing the black background and increases height between lines of text, which makes the left nav much easier on the eyes. The previous design always felt cramped to me.”, and goes on to ponder the merits of the font selection and the differences between Arial, Tahoma and Verdana.
- BorkWeb labels Alex’s brainchild “a pretty clean and snazzy design”.
- Scott Troyan blogs that “it looks nice. Very clean, retaining classic Slashdot elements, while rejecting the classic Slashdot ugly.”
- Adrian Lee ponders what makes for an effective website and states the redesign “takes that general look, and makes it much smarter and cleaner. Much easier to read and skim over, generally nicer on the eyes and I don’t feel like my attention is pulled around as much. Generally I’m impressed.”
- S. Shreyas calls the new design “a very decent layout and 100x better than the older one”, though critizing aspects like the grey color and whitespace usage, goes on to lament that the runner-up’s, Peter’s, design was slashdotted and unavailable for review.
- Darren Foong is short and succinct: “it’s extremely awesome.”
International coverage
Here’s a quick sampling of reactions from the non-English part of the blogosphere:
- Chinese: Solidot, Gea-Suan Lin’s blog.
- Danish: Cssdesign.dk
- Dutch: Bakje.nl Jatlog, UZY.nl
- French: Scrapbrain
- German: Macelodeon, observatory, praegnanz.de
- Greek: pestaola.gr, Wiggler.gr
- Hungarian: Hungarian Unix Portal
- Italian: Luca Mondini
- Japanese: hirokixs
- Polish: miscz.pl
- Spanish: Abadia Digital, aNieto2K, Barrapunto, Bitperbit, DesdeGuate.com, menéame, Microsiervos, Un Blog Más, Vecindad Gráfica
- Thai: Blognode
- Turkish: Fazlamesai
More buzz in the blogosphere can be found at Technorati and, of course, Google.
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