The Blog
Using These Styles With StyleCatcher
All of these styles can be fantastic assets for your blog, but figuring out how to get them from this site to your own blog can sometimes feel overwhelming. Fortunately for Movable Type users, Stylecatcher makes the whole process painless, especially now that Movable Type now comes with Stylecatcher built right in.
The process looks a little something like this: 1. Make sure you're running the latest MT install, 2. Click 'Select a Design using StyleCatcher' from your blog's main menu, 3. Put 'http://www.thestylearchive.com/browse/' in the Theme URL field. Then all you have to do is find the theme you like, choose your blog in the drop down menu and click 'Apply Selected Design'. The theme files are downloaded and the CSS is automatically updated and rebuilt. Check out your blog, and don't forget to refresh.
If you're not so keen on having to wade through them all, we've also set it up so that you can specify an individual theme's url on the Stylecatcher page. For instance, typing 'http://www.thestylearchive.com/designs/web_2oz_emerald_city' in the Theme URL field would just show that particular theme.
Style Contest Judge: Kathy Scoleri
Since we've wrapped up our interview series with the winners of The Style Contest, we're spending time with each of the contest judges. Today we're speaking with Kathy Scoleri of Moxie Design Studios.
Style Contest Judge: Joelle Reeder
Since we've wrapped up our interview series with the winners of The Style Contest, we're spending time with each of the contest judges. Today we're speaking with Joelle Reeder of Moxie Design Studios. Check back every week for a new interview.
Style Contest Judge: Douglas Beach
Since we've wrapped up our interview series with the winners of The Style Contest, we're beginning a new series with the contest judges. Today we're speaking with Douglas Beach from Adobe. Check back every week for a new interview.
Style Contest Designer: Liz Lubowitz
This post is the final in a series of interviews with the winners of The Style Contest. Today we're speaking with Liz Lubowitz, whose theme, The Late Show, was the overall winner in The Style Contest. Liz also won in the "Sports and Recreation" category with her homage to baseball, The Road to October.
Style Contest Designer: Simone Plebani
This post is the fourth in a series of interviews with the winners of The Style Contest. Check back every week to meet a new Style Contest design winner. Today we're speaking with Simone Plebani, whose Magic Paper theme won in the "Hobbies and Crafts" category.
Style Contest Designer: Victoria Wang
This post is the third in a series of interviews with the winners of The Style Contest. Check back every week to meet a new Style Contest design winner. Today we're speaking with Victoria Wang, whose Summer Love theme won in the "Home and Family" category.
Style Contest Designer Interview Series: Parker Torrence
This post is the second in a series of interviews with the winners of The Style Contest. Check back every week to meet a new Style Contest design winner. Today we're speaking with Parker Torrence, whose Top Secret theme won in the "News, Politics, and Current Events" category.
Continue reading "Style Contest Designer Interview Series: Parker Torrence" »
Style Contest Designer Interview Series
This post is the first in a series of interviews with the winners of The Style Contest. Check back every week to meet a new Style Contest design winner. Today we're speaking with Caroline Cano Morant, whose Make My Way theme won in the Technology category.
Continue reading "Style Contest Designer Interview Series" »
Take 2
As we promised, The Style Contest is in the process of becoming The Style Archive.
Our first step was to redesign the site. The original look was to bring people in and inspire unique designs. Now we're turning the focus more on the styles themselves with a more subtle, minimalist approach. The front page of TheStyleContest.com will stay winner-centric as this site itself will essentially become dormant (until...); all of the exploring, announcements and submissions will be going on at TheStyleArchive.com which will launch shortly.
In the process of changing everything over, you may see some things you shouldn't see. Cover your eyes and forgive us for being rude. We hope you enjoy the change...
And the winners are...
As I awaited the email announcing the winners, I worried about what I would say in my post to make the official announcement. I composed in my head one post after another, and then proverbially crumbled each one up and tossed into the trash already overflowing with all my previous attempts.
But then I realized that there is not much I need to say. In the end, the winners speak for themselves.
Keep hitting refresh!
The judges are in the final stages of tallying their scores. It has been a long weekend for everyone involved and I am pleased to see that the judging process we came up with has been working so well. In the meantime, I have been watching the comment notifications flood my email box of people wondering "are we there yet?"
"How about now?" Refresh. Nope.
"Now?" Refresh. Still no.
Wait 3 minutes. "Ok, it must be now." Refresh. Darn it -- no.
Well, to all those people: it won't be that much longer. I don't want to rush the judges, so I can't tell you when exactly, but we all hope it will be soon. So stay tuned.
Bad News.
Well, as you all already know, we've recieved heaps and heaps of fantastic styles, many of which are already recieving rave reviews.
The bad news is that because of the large number of excellent styles, the judging process has been more difficult and taken longer than was originally expected. So we're postponing the announcement until Monday, July 3rd.
We hate making you all wait (it sucks!); but we want all the styles to get a fair chance, and rushing the judges is the last thing we want to do. So we trust you'll all bear with us during these extra few days. Thanks again for your patience!
Hats Off To You
The Style Contest submission process is now closed.
The time for submitting has ended, but the contest has just begun. In an enormous swell of creativity, over one hundred and forty designs in all were submitted to The Style Contest and now our distinguished judges have the privilege of poring over each one to decide our contest winners.
Thanks to everyone who's hard work and effort have made this contest a success. You've not only put yourself in the running for some great prizes, but you've improved the community with your designs and you've given people one more reason to love their blogs.
Be sure to check back on June 23, 2006 when we announce our winners; or better yet, subscribe for instant notification of our announcements. We'll have comments from our judges on the winners as well some new Style Catcher goodness. Submissions will be reopened after the winners are announced and The Style Contest will become a style repository, totally integrated with Style Catcher. All of it right here, same bat time, same bat url.
Stay tuned.
The Breakdown
For those of you foaming at the mouth for any inkling of what your chances of winning are, here's the breakdown of entries per category at the close:
The Final Day
We're here at last with just over 12 hours left and the submissions are pouring in.
A few things to keep in mind to help make this final day of the contest run smoothly.
1. Check the submission guidelines before submitting. With alot of people getting styles in last minute, we're in overdrive to make sure they're published ASAP; but submissions close precisely at 10pm PST, so if you're style is borked and it doesn't get approved after 10pm, there's no post-deadline updating. So as we draw nearer that cutoff time, look your entries over very carefully before submitting. Oh, and be sure that you put all files in one directory. Our latest batch of submissions had quite a few with incorrect file structures.
2. Update old styles, don't resubmit. Several contestants have been resubmittiing tweaked styles instead of updating the older versions of the style. This essentially creates two copies of your one style, confusing people visiting the site, making more work for us and looking rather unprofessional. Please help us, the people browing for styles and yourself by updating instead of resubmitting. And don't forget, when updating, you still need to provide the thumbnail image!
3. Don't overupdate. For the sake of our sanity, please (please, please) try to make sure all is well with your style before updating. Some contestants are updating their styles every 5 minutes. This fills up our queue pretty quickly, bogs down our server and makes it harder for us (Arvind, who has exams tomorrow) to give each style the attention it needs. Be cool. Think before you update. Muchos Gracias!
We're totally psyched about so many of you great designers turning out in droves. Thanks for being understanding and helpful and thanks especially for all your hard work!
Protecting your copyrights
They say that "imitation is the best form of flattery." If that is true then participants in The Style Contest will be "flattered" to learn that many of their designs have been copied and replicated for Blogger users as well. This is not necessarily a "bad thing," but we want you to know nevertheless.
Because we at Six Apart and the organizers of The Style Contest felt strongly that the designs created by its participants should be owned and copyrighted by the participant themselves, the responsibility of protecting your intellectual property falls sqaurely and exclusively on your shoulders. So, if anyone feels that their design is [ever] being used without their express permission, then you need to file an official DMCA Copyright Infringement Notification with the service provider hosting the content, which in this case is Google.
But perhaps the spread of the Six Apart HTML "standard" into Blogger will help the industry more than hurt it, by spurring more designers to create even more themes and styles compatible with the standard. I think this development is a great endorsement for what The Style Contest is all about: CSS centered design, and the need for a more widely adopted HTML standard for blog templates.
Reminder: This is last weekend for submissions!
A quick note to remind everyone that this is the last weekend that The Style Contest will be accepting submissions (the contest officially ends at 10:00pm pST on Monday June 5, 2006). Since we have heard that several contestants were holding back their submission(s) until the very last moment to protect their design from being cloned or copied, we are all dying to see what styles will be submitted in the contest's race to the finish line!
The Final Stretch and Browser Compatibility
This is the last week for style submissions. All submissions are due on Monday, June 5th, at 10:00 pm, PST. If you've already submitted a style, this is time to make any final adjustments. In particular, note that browser compatibility is one of the judging criteria. Your styles should not suffer hiccups under IE, Firefox, or Safari. If you don't have access both a Mac and PC for browser comparisons, you can try out the http://www.browsercam.com service. BrowserCam has a 24-hour evaluation period where you can check up to 200 screen captures for Free. You can also leave a comment on your style itself here at the Style Contest, requesting assistance if you are having difficulty trouble-shooting a problem. I've also seen people ask for stylesheet help over at the MT Support Forums. (Given that getting these styles to work properly benefits the entire community, I don't think there will be a problem with posting your questions at the forum, at least for this week. But don't quote me on that, I don't work for Six Apart.) The W3C CSS Validation Service can also sometimes be helpful.
Continue reading "The Final Stretch and Browser Compatibility" »
Changes Afoot
Personally, I found browsing submitted styles ridiculously difficult. Even harder was keeping track of the comments posted across the site. So, this weekend, I put my head down and revamped our entire infrastructure. Here are some of the things that we've changed:
Submission Deadline Extended to June 5th
Hello everybody. Like those of you who have been hard at work to create the fabulous styles we've seen so far, we contest organizers (volunteers and Six Apart employees) have also been working hard ironing out bugs in the process. Today we put our collective heads together and decided that everyone could use a little more time. So...
...we've extended the Style Contest submission deadline three weeks, to June 5th.
(Whew. Now we can all breath.)
Everything is moved out three weeks. The submission deadline is now 10:00 pm PST, June 5th, 2006. The winners should be announced June 23rd.
Let the good times roll.
The Great Userpic Debacle
After many comments from our LiveJournal users concerning our poorly placed userpics, we knew a revision was in order. So Arvind and I set up our own LiveJournals so we could experience Bloggish first hand, and we've now updated the contest templates to reflect the correct LJ placement of userpics:
.entry > .entry-content > .entry-userpic
.comments > .comments-content > .comment > .comment-userpic
Since there is no specific styling of userpics in the base-weblog.css, we've pulled our userpic styling out. (What were we thinking?!) We'll also be updating the Style Browser markup in the next few days to reflect these fixes and to include userpics that are hidden by default (so as not to break current styles). If you want to include them, however, you'll be able to. We're staggering the Style Browser update to give everyone a chance to look over their styles with the revised contest templates and make sure all is well.
And finally, just a reminder that userpics are totally optional in The Style Contest. If you decide to support them, great. If you don't, just be sure to use "display: none;" to ensure a consistent style across all platforms.
Thank you all for your patience as we iron out these wrinkles! And be sure to grab the latest (and hopefully last) edition of our default styles.
Mentionables
In the true spirit of spring, we've busted out the buckets and soap and made a few changes 'round here:
A Double Take
We're thrilled to see the entries pouring in now, especially with such a strong diversity in the styles. Looking them over though, we've noticed that some styles need a double take. Some look great in Firefox, but they break terribly in Internet Explorer, and vice versa. (Welcome to the world of web design!) While you aren't required to make a style work in all browsers, it certainly helps broaden the appeal of your style and give it a better run with the judges.
All you need is a text editor and a browser
I have received a number of requests from designers wondering how they can compete in this competition if they don't have a LiveJournal or TypePad Pro account, or if they don't have a copy of Movable Type installed. LiveJournal users have been especially perplexed because the functionality allowing them to apply arbitrary stylesheets to their Bloggish layouts has not yet been released (but it will in the not too distant future). The answer to all of these designers is actually the same:
All you need is a text editor and a browser.
Continue reading "All you need is a text editor and a browser" »
The new official contest files
We’ve been getting some great feedback from designers and users alike and we’ll be acting on a lot of it soon. Today, however, we’ve addressed a concern many designers had whereby our initial offering of sample templates did not reflect all the possible CSS classes and IDs. Hence, we’ve expanded that offering to include not only an Index Template but also the three typical archive templates on Movable Type, Typepad and LiveJournal blogs. These new sample templates can be viewed here.
Clarifications for LiveJournal users
We’ve already received some great feedback especially from the LiveJournal camp so I thought I’d address a few of these points. Before I do, however, let me first say that from the very beginning of the contest planning, participation from designers in the LiveJournal community and use of the styles by all LJ users was absolutely a cornerstone of the contest.
However, given that we are all Movable Type and TypePad users and had a great deal to do just to get the contest launched, we now realize that we failed to adequately explain how LJ users could participate and how they could use the designs from the contest. For that, we apologize and now intend to do exactly that.
Making it simple for ALL designers
The first problem is that we didn’t make it easy enough for LiveJournal designers to participate since the templates contain tags used in TypePad and Movable Type, and not LiveJournal’s S2 code. This is absolutely true and something that we simply overlooked.
So, to solve this problem, we’ve created a set of output pages using the various layouts. These pages contain the output after the Movable Type/TypePad template tags are parsed and can be used instead in creating your styles. Because the HTML structure and class/id attributes are exactly the same, the styles will be compatible with the templates themselves.
What’s more, like CSS Zen Garden, any designer (not just Movable Type, TypePad or even LiveJournal users) can use these pages in creating their styles.
Using the styles in LiveJournal
Some people have expressed confusion over how LiveJournal users could use the styles created by the contest, given that they contain MT/TP template tags and not S2 code. This is completely understandable and stems from the fact that we didn’t explain our intentions well enough.
My understanding (and again, forgive me for my LJ ignorance), is that the styles created for the contest are absolutely compatible[1], but cannot entered easily by users. The intention that we failed to communicate was that at end of the contest, all of the styles would be made available to LiveJournal users from within LJ without any need for individual users to do the work to incoporate them manaully.
The Style Contest for Movable Type, TypePad AND LiveJournal
In summary, let me say that we absolutely want participation by the LiveJournal community of designers and have always intended for LiveJournal users to reap the benefits of this contest. It was only because we are all Movable Type and TypePad users ourselves and our relative uncertainty about all things LJ that caused us to be less than clear about those intentions.
Again, we apologize and look forward to making any further changes that we need to to make sure that inclusiveness in a reality and not just a nice pie-in-the-sky ideal. As always please let us know if anything else gets your goat. So to speak…
[1] - Compatible in HTML structure and attributes with the Bloggish template which was introduced as part of the standard Six Apart styles initiative last August.
Design Matters
Designers are the unsung heroes of the blogosphere. Their work allows us all to express a character, and personality with our blogs.
The Style Contest was created to enable the design community to explore the contribution their expertise makes to the quality of blogging tools. The contest was created to give designers an opportunity to push the envelope of design and user experience. It was created to give them a forum to remind us of the important role designers play in our lives online. And in the process to recognize them, promote them and reward them.
We've gathered judges like Jason Santa Maria and Derek Powazek, design gurus with an eye for the exceptional, not to mention the Moxie girls who meld fun and functional in everyone of their projects. We have also attracted sponsors like Six Apart and Adobe, companies synonymous with internet design.
Designers--this contest is for you. To thank you. To recognize you. And to reward you with a prize pool valued at over $17,000!
Welcome to The Style Contest. We can't wait to see what you come up with.
Welcome to The Style Contest
Welcome to the official Six Apart Style Contest! So here's what we're all about: gathering all of the best designs for your blog in one place and rewarding great designers. This is far more than a contest, it's a style repository.
If you're a web designer, we invite you to join the fray and share with us your web artistry. Imagine an opportunity to make money for doing something you love... that's The Style Contest.
If you're a blogger, we invite you to look around and find a style that fits your taste. The best designs from the best designers right here for use on your TypePad, LiveJournal and Movable Type blogs.
Welcome To The Style Contest!
Finally, you can let your creative juices flow, enhance an already valuable community and get rewarded for doing it!