I'm a little confused - are the 4 styles currently in the "style browser" built on the official templates? Where are the column-switching functions coming from? They're not included in your download packages.
If I read the rules correctly, *none* of those examples would be eligible for the contest, because they are not "...compatible with the main index and all three archive templates for at least one layout listed here"
I guess my question is: we're not allowed to modify the templates, right? Just come up with a look & feel and write the CSS?
Also, if anyone else is interested, I re-created the content used in the Style Browser examples in a default MT install, then exported the entries. You can download and import them into your own:
http://bryanbuchs.com/thestylecontest.com.txt
I'm looking at this from the perspective of an LJ user and really going 'feh'. I don't feel like I could create something I'd want to use. These templates are all super-MTish. Where's the user icon go in this template? What if I want to do some styling based around the fact that LJ's comments are nested trees, rather than a simple date list? What's my Friends List going to look like?
If people only style this with MT's capabilities, a lot of LJ will never use these. User icons are a significant part of the grammar of an LJ post or comment for a lot of people there.
I mean, part of the point of entering this sort of thing is the theoretical joy of stumbling across your own design on a complete stranger's blog, right?
When the contest was first announced last week, I polled the people on my LiveJournal friends and friend-of list for questions and concerns regarding this contest so that we might be able to pool them together and come up with some useful feedback for you guys. A couple of my concerns have already been addressed: the implementation of external stylesheet linking for the LJ Bloggish template, as well as finally making an announcement in the News community where people might actually see it.
Egypt's comment above brings up another of the main concerns that several of my fellow LJers had: namely, userpics and threaded comments are an absolutely huge consideration when designing for LiveJournal, and there is a great fear that the majority of the submissions will be by MT/TP users who won't necessarily think to consider this aspect [through no fault of their own] because it's not part of their own daily blogging experience. The static templates -- especially the individual entry archive page -- that were provided don't really help in this regard, because they too do not take into consideration these features. Yes, these features are unique to LiveJournal, but at the same time ignoring them completely may not be the best option.
My main concern, though, is how there isn't a single person on the judging panel who is familiar with LiveJournal in an intimate way who would be able to understand what goes into designing for LJ. Yes, good design is good design, period, but at the same time form follows function and despite the standardization of the three systems across MT, TP, and LJ, designing for LJ is still different from designing for MT or TP. I fear that without someone who actually is familiar with the system, designers coming from an LJ background might be shortchanged in the grand scheme of things.
Yeah. Heck, I'd like to see this 'standardization' have some positive effects for LJ, like comments being marked up as nested lists rather than a long series of divs with inline style to simulate nesting! (I've done this on my own LJ, and it lets me play with the left borders to help show the comment hierarchy a bit better - plus it was great for Lynx until LJ started auto-detecting that and forcing a specially-pessimized Lynx style.)
But these templates are completely from the MT world. I wouldn't actually want to use Bloggish because of things like the way it forces the author of a post down to the bottom, far away from the icon - terrible for my friends list.
If MT designers can ignore userpics and comments in their designs, can we ignore things like trackbacks and category archives?
Or perhaps the HTML (and MT templates) for everyone to skin can, you know, include some of this? I'm debating if I want to actually stick 'em in there myself.
...Why does the content move between the 'alpha' and 'beta' divs depending on how many columns you're using? Didn't I read something somewhere about 6A settling on this naming scheme to abstract away from 'the confusion of a "right" div ending up on the left in some schemes'?
And you want people to make CSS that'll work regardless of how many columns you have? Is this some kind of sick joke? What's wrong with semantically helpful names for the divs like 'content' and 'sidebar1' and 'sidebar2', and always flowing the actual content into the 'content' div?
As another aside (I can't speak to the LiveJournal issues ... aside from pretty much agreeing with everybody else), the current official HTML files are sorely lacking.
If you're wanting these contest entries to be ready-out-of-the-box templates for public consumption, you need to give designers HTML files to work off of that include all the features and classes and ids they will have to work with.
The current files include no comments or trackbacks, for instance. In order to code a design for those, I had to port my design into a fresh MT blog, add in some filler comments and trackbacks and finish coding off the server (mainly because I was too lazy to download the straight HTML from the resulting page).
That's not going to be a real encouragement to people entering the contest (especially those without access to Typepad or Movable Type).
If you're wanting these contest entries to be ready-out-of-the-box templates for public consumption, you need to give designers HTML files to work off of that include all the features and classes and ids they will have to work with.
I could not agree more with this.
If you're wanting these contest entries to be ready-out-of-the-box templates for public consumption, you need to give designers HTML files to work off of that include all the features and classes and ids they will have to work with.
I agree, I can't believe we left of trackbacks and comments. I'll be adding those shortly with any other content that could possibly appear on the above sample pages. Apologies for the delay.
Alright the Individual Entry Archives for all layouts now contain trackbacks and comments. The zip and tar/gz files have been updated and I'm scanning the templates to see if there's anything else. Once again, sorry for not including those in the first place.
First of all I wanted to thank everyone who has contributed their thoughts to this thread, and about making your feelings and voices clear in regards to LiveJournal. This conversation is important, because its not just about LiveJournal, but about creating styles that will work equally with all of our products.
Determining the rules for this contest was far more complex then any of either imagined. What was especially challenging was coming up with the baseline template that people should design to, because we had to weigh the trade-offs of including all of the features unique to LJ, and all the features unique to TypePad, againt trying to keep things simple enough as to not scare people away from participating due to complexity. If the templates appear to be MT-centric its only because Movable Type represents the common denominator between all three of these products.
So we err'ed on the side of simplicity, fully realizing that not every stylesheet could be FULLY and EQUALLY applied across all three products. For those styles that really stood out and for which their was sufficient interest we would either a) work with the designer to incorporate a few more style elements, and/or b) have Six Apart designers familiar with the intricacies of each product adapt styles to LiveJournal, TypePad and/or Movable Type.
But this thread has made one thing clear - that the common denominator may not have been the ideal choice. So we reincorporated trackbacks and comments. And I think next we need to incorporate userpics.
The good news is that I don't think the rules need to change. The following judging criteria I think says it all:
Completeness of design
And the way I interpret that, it means that the more page elements styled, the better. If some page elements are ignored, then that may affect a judges opinion especially when compared to a style that incorporates every element within their design.
Does this help to address some of the concerns and issues raised?
There was another concern that was brought up that I failed to address:
And you want people to make CSS that'll work regardless of how many columns you have? Is this some kind of sick joke?
Absolutely not. In fact, in the style submission form, designers are asked to select which layouts their sytles work for. We recognize that some of the most complex designs we hope this contest generates may only work with a single layout in order for background images and the like to align properly.
So it is vital (and hopefully obvious) that every style MUST work with at least one layout. The caveat being, that judges may take into considerattion the completeness of the design in their judging process. However, at the end off the day, our judges will be fair and will place creativity and originality of design over technical completeness.
After all, one totally unique and creative design that only works with a two-column left layout is much more interesting then a port of "Kubrick" that works with all the possible layouts - barnone.
And the way I interpret that, it means that the more page elements styled, the better. If some page elements are ignored, then that may affect a judges opinion especially when compared to a style that incorporates every element within their design.
Exactly, so I'm glad that the track backs and comments [and userpics, if we're lucky] have now been incorporated into the templates. I'm predominantly an LJ user at this point, but I've got no problems designing for MT trackbacks and the like. Thanks for making the changes, everyone. :)
My point with the 'sick joke' comment (which I obviously wrote when I was frustrated) was that the fact that you can't rely on the content being in any particular div makes it a major pain to build something that adapts to all possibilities - since the body copy might be in #alpha or #beta, I'm ending up with selectors like
.layout-one-column #alpha, .layout-two-column-right #alpha, .layout-two-column-left #beta, .layout-three-column #beta { css-goes:here }
with bitchy comments above them wondering why the content div didn't just get named #content.
I've put userpics and LJ-style nested comments into my own copy of the templates; I'll be glad to pass them on.
(email me - egypt at urnash dot com - and I'll zip up my userpicified and commentified templates so they can get put up here.)
Oh, hey, doesn't MT have some sort of comment-owner image support, too? Images served by typekey or something like that? If so, one or more sample comments ought to have those.
ljified templates
* some lj-style nested comments
* userpics
* template files are .html not .txt for easier editing
* includes lj-style year and month views, which are significantly different from mt-style views, even using the mt compatibility layer (urls redacted to exampleuser.livejournal.com, feel free to change the header/subheader and crop down my tags list before reposting)
enjoy.
Thanks Egypt.
I've already resubmitted my first style once to fix a few things I hadn't thought about (It doesn't make a lot of sense to image replace a badge for MT on a TP or LJ page, for instance), and when I get a chance, I'll resubmit again to work in some of those LJ-specific things (which look like they could actually be a bit of fun).
I was wondering if there was any wavering on the 18 and older rule? Maybe a parental consent form? I've been doing design for almost 3 years now and I own my own domain but I am under 18 and feel it would be more fair to all designers and users if a parental consent form was added. Those tricky teenagers are always sneaking up with creative designs, plus there are probably as many younger users as their are older ones on these blogging sites.
I wanted to let people know monitoring this thread that we intend on releasing an updated version of the standard templates. These updated versions will incorporate the concept of a "userpic" into the comments area. As a word of caution to LiveJournal designers, we are not incorporating every single design element of LiveJournal because we are trying to strike a balance between simplicity for the contest and being respectful to the core components of the LiveJournal community.
We recommend creating styles based off of the published templates (regardless of their perceived completeness) as that will be the basis for judging. If additional style elements have been incorporated that is awesome. If some style elements for LiveJournal are omitted because they are not in the defaul templates, then Six Apart will work with designers after the contest in addressing the additional style elements as necessary as styles are incorporated into each product/platform.
It is with regret that I say that we cannot make an exception to the eligibility rules regarding age. All contestants must be 18 years or older. If anyone would like to talk further about the eligibility requirements please contact me at thestylecontest@sixapart.com.
We recommend creating styles based off of the published templates (regardless of their perceived completeness) as that will be the basis for judging.
[...]
...Six Apart will work with designers after the contest in addressing the additional style elements...
This brings up another question: Cross-browser compatibility.
I'm working on a style that does a lot of positioning to completely break out of the 'two or three columns' straitjacket. Works fine on Safari, works fine on Firefox. People who've seen the beta tell me it's garbaged on IE. I'm doing this for fun, I don't have a Windows machine to test on, I'm not a Professional Web Designer with a head full of Ugly IE Compatibility Hacks.
What browser/OS will the judging take place on? Will I get voted down if I hide half my style from IE and stick a gif saying 'This looks fifty times cooler on a browser that's not IE' into IE's view, or will I get grins and chuckles?
And is 6A going to help wrestle cross-browser compatibility into the winning entries, and the non-winning ones?
What browser/OS will the judging take place on?
Judging will take place across all browsers, as part of the judging criteria is browser compatibility.
Will I get voted down if I hide half my style from IE and stick a gif saying 'This looks fifty times cooler on a browser that's not IE' into IE's view, or will I get grins and chuckles?
Judges are encouraged to be as reasonable as possible - each designer will need to strike their own balance between pushing the envelope, originality and browser compatibility. Keep in mind that between two equally amazing designs, one that works in all browsers, and one that doesn't... well, which one would you elect to win?
And is 6A going to help wrestle cross-browser compatibility into the winning entries, and the non-winning ones?
When the contest concludes, yes we will. To the greatest extent possible.
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