And the winner is…
October 20th, 2007 by Daniel WestergrenTime has come to finally announce the winner of the design competition! First we wish to thank all who submitted their designs and made it a tough call for us to decide.
Let’s hear some drum rolls… as we announce the winner… Steve Sicherman!
Steve - who is from Saskatoon, Canada - is currently working together with the Development Team with the markup for his design. It may take awhile before the site is dressed in its new clothes, as we also will do some restructuring in the process.
For the curious of you, have a preview of the homepage and an example of the sub pages.
We are very happy with Steve’s design and think this will give a fresh, new look to the website of CMS Made Simple.
For this, Steve will be sent some CMSMS swag as I learnt the Americans call it, that is some stuff with the CMSMS logo on it. For more info about Steve Sicherman and his work, please visit his website at stevesicherman.com. There are some great examples of other designs he has made there too.
Steve Sicherman writes this about himself:
I’ve been designing web sites since ‘95, and working for companies building enterprise-level Content Management Systems for about 6 years. My experience in the industry is what drew me to CMS Made Simple, I was very surprised to find an open source CMS application that was doing so many things right. While there are a number of powerful Open Source CMS’s out there, CMSMS is the only one I’m comfortable handing over to clients with very little experience updating web content.
Again, our thanks to Steve and to everyone who submitted their designs! Sorry to those who would have liked to take part to, but weren’t able to because of time constraints… There is a redesign of the themes site in the making, so we look forward to some great designs being posted there.
October 20th, 2007 at 10:54 am
As i have obviously missed the contest… i just want to add that a subtle logo change would be good…
I have a couple suggestions here:
http://kemal.itbox.ba/uploads/images/cmslogo.jpg
October 20th, 2007 at 11:07 am
Very nice design!!!
Congratulations Steve.
October 20th, 2007 at 11:08 am
Nice.
October 20th, 2007 at 11:14 am
Thanks Kemal! We will look into that as well.
October 20th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
excellent work steve!!! congrats to you and to the core dev team for getting a sweet design for your hard work. this was definitely the right way to move forward in spreading the cmsms message. also, Kemal i really like your ideas for slight logo revising. subtle changes to logos are good when done right and progressively: http://www.workz.com/content/view_content.html?section_id=469&content_id=5207
October 20th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Very Nice!
October 20th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
BTW I like Kemal’s logo very much
October 20th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
It’s clean and simple - I like it! I also like Kemal’s logo tweak.
October 20th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Thank you people, i was going for the subtle yet visible change.
As my previous post was written in hurry, i forgot to congratulate the winner, who manage to make the design simple and informative yet sleek and original, way to go Steve!
October 20th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Very nice indeed.
In honour of our new “Designed in Canada” look, I propose a new slogan as well:
“It’s Simple, eh?”
October 20th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Fake!
I can tell from the pixels…
October 20th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Lol Mehmet.
Looks Web2..shiny and cool.
Good work Steve!
October 20th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Awesome design Steve.
I hope them use the new CMSMS 1.2 to integrate it!!!
Congrats !!!
October 21st, 2007 at 7:31 am
Nice design, and here are some my suggestions:
1) update logo too (Kemal’s ones look good)
2) try to make header of the site (part with the logo) little bit more sexy. Right now the main eye-catcher is the top menu and the greenish banner. It should be the logo and brand name to catch your eye and stay in your head.
3) green banner is the only place, where the green color is used - in my opinion, you should: use green color in other places too or remove it completely from this banner
4) also colors in google ads should be or black or some “site-colors”
Good work guys!
I’m happy this CMS is living so exciting life.
October 21st, 2007 at 7:38 am
Sorry guys - one more thing
I noticed the corners around right-side part are round, but only on the top. Try to use them everywhere - bottom corners too, corners of the top menu, corners of the whole site maybe… To make the design solid.
October 21st, 2007 at 12:06 pm
I like this design… It’s really cool.
October 21st, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Nice modern looking design, getting us up to speed with our competition!
Will we see this design reflected a an admin panel theme in the next CMSMS release? (fingers crossed)
100% go the Kemal Logos (unless someone else has a better suggestion). They’re great!
-Tim
October 22nd, 2007 at 9:47 am
I like the design a lot
I really like Kemal’s logos… I think you should use one!
October 22nd, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Is it possible to post the other design proposals to give an overview over the candidates?
October 23rd, 2007 at 4:15 am
I think it’s nice, but quite “standard” design in nowadays. I call this kind of design as “sugar design”
However it’s much better then current design, because it is more clear. Good work.
October 23rd, 2007 at 5:28 am
Very nice layout. Very well done and as it seems quite user-friendly. Would be nice to do a logo-contest as well.
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:04 am
The design is nice but as tomas said, it’s kinda common… i was looking for something more fresh and trendy such as Light CMS : http://www.speaklight.com/ . I think there is too much text, the home page look dense.
Anyway, it’s far better than the actual one
October 25th, 2007 at 7:07 am
Nice design! A worthy winner. To bad we didn’t have time to participate, but I doubt we could have done any better anyway (different, but not better!!!)
October 25th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
How about a redesign of the admin area. We all know how easy cmcms is to use but the design does not show that off. Looking forward to having the admin area themable in cmcms 2.0.
October 27th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
The Light CMS website is hideous. To call that fresh and trendy is like calling Britney hot - it just ain’t true.
Nice design Steve. It’s very clean and to the point. Kudos.
October 28th, 2007 at 2:11 am
I really like the new design, and the new logo! I suggest a few more logos to go along with it, such as a “Powered by CMSMS” one also
October 28th, 2007 at 8:17 am
Competitions like this are great for the client (CMSMS in this case) but are horrible for the design industry in general. This, like all design competitions, where only the chosen “winner” gets something is considered spec work and generally is a negative practice. However, considering that this is a freeware under the GNU/GPL licence, I can see the reasoning here. Still, it is a point to be made… don’t participate in unpaid design competitions. It devalues what we do.
November 13th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
@Rob
Is that a joke?
That’s like saying:
“Don’t donate money to people in need because if poor people have money it devalues the money of the rich.”
If the design competition is NOT FOR PROFIT, and the company wasn’t likely to fork out money to pay a designer to make a design anyway, then wtf does it matter if someone does it for free? Noone lost. Someone won. Everyone who entered the competition did so knowing they MIGHT not win, therefore they were probably volunteering their time and not getting paid. Yeah. Volunteers are such terrible people.
It’s also equivalent to saying:
“Don’t donate time/money to open source software because it devalues the work programmers do. ”
By using CMSMS you are being a consumer of such a product and participating in the ‘negative practice’ you are complaining about. Maybe you should stop using cmsms, and wikipedia, and most of the internet which is powered on apache/linux. These projects really are just ruining the world we lived in 10 years ago. Heck, I’m gonna go put on a Metallica CD…oh the nostalgia.
Maybe your work for the RIAA or microsoft where money is the only measure of success, in that case you’re excused as it’s not your fault. I blame the parents.
-Tim
November 16th, 2007 at 1:08 am
so rob, welcome to OS. Where the income doesnt meet anything close to any private industry role but offers something far greater than you could possibly expect from anything you would pay a mid price for.
To be realistic. The majority of my bottom end clients would not be able to operate without any sort of open sourced product because costs are normally in excess of 10 to 20 grand. (in my experience anyway)
Thank you for everyones input. From the developers, to module writers, developers and the people that help out on the forums. You are all wonderful and valued contributers!
Hands down. The best piece of OS ive seen in a long time. Well done!
December 20th, 2007 at 2:48 am
Now when the new design applied it seems to me that it’s too loose in space: in the forge where there is a lot of lists (file releases, most downloaded, …), the comments on news etc. Too loose, toooo much scrolling. Compare to the left menu here which is kind of denser.
For instance white backgrounded comments take approx 2em more vertical space than the gray ones.
But anyway: looks more attractive and the newcommers will not leave immediately