squarehappy is Michael Huch is a cynical web developer and designer with more styles than content.

My Style Contest Entry

posted by Mike on 06.05.2006 2:39 PM EST | 119 comments

Thumbnail view of the Four Tone Mantis design

About a month ago I came across The Style Contest. The challenge: create a template for LiveJournal, Movable Type, and TypePad. The fabulous prizes: $4000 grand prize and seven $1000 runner-up prizes. Investigating the submissions thus far, I thought, "Hey, I can beat these guys. This is a good excuse to get off my lazy ass and put something together with a deadline."

So I set off to work on what would be named at the last second, Four Tone Mantis, a nod to my favorite Amon Tobin song. I set out to make something simple, crisp, fast loading, and ultimately a little different. Going with the retina-soothing darks and the Mike classic, blood red, I thought I had something decent on my hands. Hell, I'm my worst critic and art is subjective, so maybe others would think it was great. So far, I seem to be wrong on all of those accounts.

Check out the Four Tone Mantis preview. It'll give you the opportunity to judge for yourself, and you see the current rating (if you can find it), currently an abysmal 1.68 out of 5. People just hate my design. I'm not entirely sure as to why, but I'm regretting the choice of dark colors. Besides being a little too self-reflective, people just don't like dark colors in the age of "Web 2.0", and the dark red on dark gray was risky when there are so many user configurations to throw off the delicate balance of readability. What irks me is that some of the designs are flat out wretched and/or just don't work, and they have higher ratings than mine. My style was tuned to not be so loud and detailed that it detracted from the content, and in that same vein be a style that wouldn't look stupid if you saw it on many, many different sites, an inevitability for the winner.

What it lacks in visual flair it makes up for under the hood. The power of CSS and its ability to change entire designs with a few declarations is what made this contest possible, and being well-versed in all things CSS I thought it would be my chance to flex thse guns. But cobbling together a really ripping bit of CSS does not a rock star make. For all the hacks and pixel-pushing, it doesn't mean a whole lot if you don't make it look good. I can just point out the neat tricks in the comments in the CSS file and hope someone will get something out of them.

At least I liked the design. It will be assimilated into squarehappy soon. Go ahead and vote on it. Even a vote of 2 would raise the score. The entries will be judged by a panel of experts (so they tell us) so why do I worry about the current rating as voted on by a panel of random jerks around the internet? They didn't even give any constructive criticism.

UPDATE: Four Tone Mantis is now official squarehappy style. Click to activate the Four Tone Mantis style.

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squarehappy is Michael Huch is a cynical web developer and designer with more styles than content.

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