From the nice folks who brought you “The Old Technology Giveaway” (me) comes a new contest, with useful prizes!
Presenting: Sidebar Redesign
Objectives: Redesign and enhance the sidebar for this site (SuperfluousBanter), in keeping with the existing look and feel.
Prizes: The Grand Prize winner will receive 10 TypePad 20% Lifetime Discount codes, as well as your name credited in the “About” page of this site, a link to your site in the “External” column, and a credit in this site’s source. First Runner Up and Second Runner Up will each receive 5 TypePad 20% Lifetime Discount codes.
Requirements: If you plan to submit a working demo, it should validate as XHTML 1.0 (Transitional or Strict), and the CSS should validate and work properly in the following browsers: IE5/Mac, IE6/PC, Mozilla (and related browsers), Safari. All designs must work well in the 3 different color schemes of this site. Things I’d like are a recent comments list and a “currently enjoying” link list, but those are just ideas. Feel free to come up with ideas for its content as well (this is also an opportunity to shape a small part of the regular content of this site). Do not feel obligated to fit your design into the current sidebar dimensions: there is no restriction on size, but it should fit visually with the rest of the site design and layout.
Submissions: Post a link to your entry in the Comments of this post, in one of the following formats: JPG, GIF, PNG, PSD, or an actual working demo of your design.
Deadline: The TypePad 20% Lifetime Discount codes expire November 30th, 2003, so we will receive entries through 11:59pm EST on August 31th, 2003. The winners will be announced on or before September 30th, 2003. This will give the winners enough time to figure out how they will use their spoils.
More prizes may be added before the contest is over, and I’m certainly open to donations to the prize pool.
Questions? Email me.
Comments
6 responses to “Contest: Sidebar Redux”
i actually like the sidebar right now. it’s uncluttered and displays all the information it needs to. on the other hand it’d be interesting to see what others can do with it…
Thanks for saying so Vlad — I have considered that as a reason I’ve not been able to come up with anything I like better, but I can’t help thinking that it might just be that I’ve run out of inspiration ;-)
I’m very interested to see what might come of this, and I hope the word starts to spread soon!
Click my name to see the entry I came up with for the sidebar contest — I got kinda swamped right in the middle and finished it with only a few visual ornamentations, but spent more of my time engineering a MT backend to the whole thing, so do you use MT? It also uses php, and so if you don’t use either of those you are out of luck with the linkblog. But I just changed the colors slightly, added some separation (gamma issues with mac vs pc monitors tweak the sidebar slightly depending).
But on the design issue I though it would look best really simple, so I didn’t change it much. I axed the gray background color and added some borders to the sides basically. I was debating keeping the gray background and making the borders match the users chosen stylesheet, but never got to it.
Hi! I’ve had a bit of a go (just so you have more than one entry :) But it’s far too late and I’m not in a very inspired mode. I’ve come up with a
couple of ideas (much more evolutionary than revolutionary). I’m not very satisfied with it, but I hope it might spark some inspiration for you! I think my favourite thing is including books and music in the currently enjoying section.
I’ve got the html and css I used to generate them, but its all a bit of a mess, and I’d be more than happy to email it to you.
Hadley
Here’s my little shot at the sidebar design. It is more evolutionary than anything, and things could be rearranged as necessary. It’s not a full demo (as in you can’t easily click around the demo), but you can get the idea.
Thanks to everyone who submitted a design — the way it worked out, all three of you will receive a prize (Grand Prize, 1st and 2nd runners-up) which means that in this contest, everyone is truly a winner.
As I just returned from my long weekend in Tampa (sun, fun, singing, drinking, up till 9am this morning, etc.) I will review the submissions and post the results tomorrow. Each of you will be notified personally via email, and I’ll include your TypePad discount codes along with your final ranking.
Thanks for participating — this has been a fun experiment! :-)