ReUSEIT! Competition Winners | November 15, 2003
Well the votes have been tallied and the winners of the ReUSEIT! competition have been announced.
I think it will come as little surprise that Mike Pick's excellent Kraftsman entry scooped the top prize. Mike's design was definitely one of my personal favourites. On the face of it, the design and layout is very simple. However Mike has paid great attention to detail here and it's this subtle use of detail that really makes the design. From the superb choice of typeface to the gorgeous iconography, the design exudes subdued style, allowing the content to take center stage.
The two runners up (Only a few graphics... and Minimal Use) were also good, solid, practical designs and ones I'm sure would suit Jakob's style.
Of the others, here is a short list of my personal favourites.
- Iconic – I loved the simplicity and colours of this one. However I felt that Jakob wouldn't be so keen on the multi-coloured (non standard) links. I also thought he'd probably disapprove of the red text as red is generally associated with warnings/error messages.
- Minimal Jakob – Again I liked this one but felt Jakob would feel the colours (including the link colours) were a little subdued and lacking contrast. Also I felt he'd have thought the link icons were a little confusing (especially the warning sign icons)
- airy useit.com – Another nice design. However again I felt Jakob would think the link colour and grey text to be lacking in sufficient conttrast.
- Boxy – Another good enrty. Unfortunately the page didn't fit on my 1024x768 screen and caused horizontal scrollbars. This design also suffered from non standard link colours and a lack of contrast on the right hand panel, something I'm sure Mr Nielsen would have picked up on.
Overall the competition attracted a good spread of submissions. If I have one criticism, it's that I felt a large proportion of entrants had jumped straight into the coding before any prolonged design phase. In the early days of the web when the majority of people building sites were on the techie side rather than the design side, this is how most sites got built. However I feel there really is a need for CSS enthusiasts to spend more time in their favourite graphics packages before hitting their text editors. Theoretically at least, it's shouldn't matter if you're building the site using old skool table based layout's or lean mean CSS/(X)HTML. The design should inform the coding, not the other way around.
Posted at November 15, 2003 11:46 AM
