March 19, 2004 | View Comments (12) | Category: Version 2
Summary: Bright Corner is the winner for February.
After seeing the first round of voting I was none surprised to see these guys come out on top. They controlled over 25% of the vote in the first round, while winning the hearts of 4 out of the 5 judges. Second place goes to Brian Benzinger with Minz Meyer coming in a close third. Congratulations to the Bright Corner team, who have also mentioned they are entering every month so the level of work better step up from everyone else, and the other two finalists who will now be able to compete in the final competition next January.
The March deadline is less than 2 weeks away so if you have not started working on your submission yet, better get cracking. I already have some good ones sent in, which shows that people are beginning to understand what it is going to take to win this competition.
I chose Brian's entry for the simplicity more than anything else. Brightcorner has a lot of information packed onto their front page, but there is just too much there for my tastes, too many colours and sections. Whether it was a time constraint or not, I would have liked to see the Categories section of Brian's entry have links for the individual categories, same for the 'Featured Books' sections. There are a few usability issues with regards to the top global navigation, but still, the aesthetics and layout of this entry just do it for me.
This was quite a tough competition to judge, as the overall quality was very high. The three finalists were all on my favourites list, which made picking a winner even harder. The Minz Meyer submission was an extremely modern design with echoes of the Didier Hilhorst's excellent "Release One" Zen Garden submission. However I felt the branding was a little too modern for Project Gutenberg. Brian Benzinger submission was an extremely well crafted, yet understated piece of work and well deserving a place in the final. However my over all favourite had to be Bright Corner. This design, not only looked very professional, it managed to address the shear amount of home page content in a very intelligent manner. Everything is laid out in a logical, hierarchical fashion and design is used to structure the information, not simply to add a veneer of style over the top. The excellent information design, combined with appropriate branding, marked this submission to me as a clear winner.
Bright Corner's rendition of the Project Gutenberg homepage has a nice feel to it that hits you at first glance: the navigation is clear, the page structure and organization makes sense immediately, and the colors and heading sizes make it very easy to quickly scan the page to find what you are looking for. The layout isn't perfect (I'd like to see some stronger branding especially, and perhaps the "Recent Additions" and "Most Popular Books" could be positioned more prominently on the page), but it's easy to follow and understand the flow and organization of information. I don't feel lost when looking at it, and it has an air of respectability about it that gives the impression that it isn't just a casual project maintained in the spare time of a 14 year old with a good bookshelf (and I can say that because I *was* a 14 year old with a good bookshelf long ago).
Bright Corner�s redesign of Project Gutenberg has succesfully integrated an assortment of elements that improve user interaction. This redesign feels like a decent homepage, with scannable information and comprehesible search options. The elegant use of iconography throughout the page adds up to the overall admirable style. Bright Corner did put some considerable effort in creating a good information architecture, with the end user in mind. Downsides to this design is the somewhat unexciting header image, the overall brand experience and some text resizing complications. Other than these areas of improvement, BrightCorner delivered a fantastic effort.
A very clear choice, in my eyes. Bright Corner's design does an excellent job of displaying the many options and snippets of information a visitor to Project Gutenberg might require; be it their first, or their fifty-first visit to the site.
Navigation, search, news, recent additions, most popular choices - it's all there, and the design allows room for additional information to be added, should the need arise.
However, Bright Corner's site does have a few flaws: larger fonts sizes, narrow browser windows, removal of CSS - all of these things impact negatively on the user-experience. That said, I'm sure they could be overcome with a little more time and the application of some cash.
These are just some excerpts of their thoughts. New judges will be used every month so you do not have to continually please the same picky people ;-).
Trackback URL: http://9rules.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/180
Link --> http://www.brightcorner.com/gutenberg/
I was surprised they won. Maybe I just don't have that great of design sense but this one was really my least favorite by far. At first glance it reminded me of yahoo.com or some other bloated web site.
I do believe it is well done though with excellence, congratulations to all.
Josh
Bright Corner was my favorite overall as well. It wasn't the fanciest looking, but it had a great combination of aesthetics and IA. Dunstan pretty much nailed my thoughts saying, "be it their first, or their fifty-first visit to the site."
Way to go on all the entries, and congratulations to Bright Corner.
Chris Vincent (http://dris.dyndns.org:8080/)
I like the winning design, but there's something oh-so-very wrong with the code that pushes the h1 to overlap with the search form and the navigation to break line in the middle.
But otherwise it's top-class.
Pekka Heikkinen
I mean to constructively criticize (epecially since I learn so much from you all!) Leaving out personal preferences such as color, this page shows a couple of the weaknesses with CSS that this team of professionals should have considered. In IE6(PC), a text-size increase from Medium to Largest causes all the left content to drop to the bottom of the page (more care needed with floats, I assume.) In Firefox, overlap at the top happens badly after two size increases. At least the page validates, but aren't these accesibility issues?
Hasan (http://hasan.gopages.net/)
Congratulations! I love the content on the winning site, but there are some design and accessibilities that I would have touched up before entering this design myself.
In IE6/Win, the design breaks without even changing text size (see http://gendes.elivy.com/stuff/stuff/images/pg.jpg). In Opera/Win, the nav goes on two lines and there's some minor text overlapping (see http://gendes.elivy.com/stuff/stuff/images/pg2.jpg). The search fields are also extremely small. It looks awesome in Safari (probably because it anti-aliases all those HTML headings), but unfortunately there are a lot of people who can't use that browser. But the markup is quite semantic for the most part, which is good, although IMO some "text-transform: uppercase;" might do some good. ;)
Design-wise, its very nice, but I am slightly disturbed by the amount of different colors and fonts used. Cursive (logo), serif (at the top), different serif ("project notes"), sans-serif (body headings), different sans-serif ("search" button)... Also the colors of the header and footer differ, and pink, green, red, and orange are all used. I dont think its consistent enough in either of these regards, and it leads to a feeling of "Where do I look?" for me at least.
Good job, though. I'm really looking forward to seeing your design for the current contest.
thomas (http://gendes.elivy.com)
I don't like the design. It's too much crammed with information, too difficult to scan the page... And not so lively either.
dusoft (http://www.ambience.sk/)
We appreciate the feedback. We were aware of these issues when we made the submission.
It was made on a very tight timeline because we found out about the contest fairly late. It was also our first stab at full XHTML. Given the browser testing, font resizing, the learning curve, I had to choose my battles, and all the issues everyone is pointing out seemed like simple things that could be fixed with another couple of hours of work. Ask Scrivs, we sent our submission at approximately 11:58 est. ;)
Our next entry will be a significant improvement. It's all about growth right?
Garrett Dimon (http://www.brightcorner.com)
My huge THANKS to everyone for all these great ideas for the Project Gutenberg Web pages. Consider joining the gutvol-w mailing list (sub info at gutenberg.net) if you'd like to participate further. We'll be drawing from many of the submitted designs, and really got some great ideas.
To submitters: if you are willing, please send me any art work that you would like to make available to Project Gutenberg (copyright prevents us from just lifting it). We will be happy to add it to our artwork archive, and possibly to use it on the new site.
Thanks again!
Greg Newby (http://gutenberg.net)
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#1
How about a link to the winner?
S.A. Miller