CMS Made Simple Forums

In light of recent articles, and in the interest of updating its main sites, CMSMS is holding a design competition for re-designing cmsmadesimple.org.

If you're a talented designer and think you've got what it takes to take the CMSMS domains to the next level, then keep reading.

CMSMS needs you!

We can't offer much in the way of incentive or prizes - this is an open source project, remember?! - but we can promise you kudos and praise beyond your wildest dreams. Plus the sure knowledge that your name will be up in lights across all the CMSMS domains in perpetuity, or at least until we need another re-design. Maybe we'll even give you a free t-shirt...


Here are the guidelines:

• Your design should preferably be provided as a CMSMS Theme. That is, export templates and stylesheets with the module called Theme Manager (can be installed through the Module Manager) to an xml file.
• You may also provide a Photoshop layered image, although that makes it more difficult to win...
• If you include images with a theme, link them to the uploads/images/<themename> folder in the stylesheets and pack the theme xml file and the image(s) in a zip or tar file.
• Themes should be valid XHTML 1.0 transitional and CSS 2.1 (minimum). That means no hacks, or as few as humanly possible, and same appearance in all major browsers.
• No Flash or other propritary technologies - avoid Java and JavaScripts to the greatest extent possible.
  • [li]blink tag is banned
  • gif animations are just as bad as flash
  [/li]
• We would like to see a Web 2.0, clean and accessible layout.
• We would like you to use CMSMMS tags in the templates. These include but are not limited to {sitename}, {title}, {breadcrumbs}, {search}, {content}, {footer} etc.
• You may include content example pages in the zip file.
• The general navigation structure should be similar to the current site structure, but flexible enough to be able to adjust.
• Everything included in the theme must be the designer's original work. No copyrighted images or template theft!

Timeline:

• Send all themes to competition@cmsmadesimple.org at the last by October 10 2007.
  • [li]include your contact details in the email and in a README.txt file in the zip package
               
  [/li]
• A jury from the core team will select which theme will be used for cmsmadesimple.org. The winner will be announced on October 15.
• Themes that are submitted as proper packages will be presented on the themes site (http://themes.cmsmadesimple.org) after the winner has been announced

Disclaimer:
CMS Made Simple claims the right to edit the winning design to fit with the site structure.

Well?! What are you waiting for? Get designing.

hmm i've got a pretty busy month but i`ll try to join the competition.

anyway i`m guessing you want to keep the current logo? Maybe you can upload a vector one for us to use?

From the blog:

Thanks for your interest all!

Indeed, what we are after is a great design for cmsmadesimple.org. Although not clearly expressed in the original post we do accept Photoshop images for submissions, without necessarily any XHTML/CSS for it. We have volunteers who can do that part of the layout, as long as we have a great design to start out from!

And yes, designers have freedom to certain extent with the CMSMS Logo. If we feel it drifts too far we may edit it, but if it suits the design better some changes to the logo are fine.

By Web 2.0 we mainly mean a clean, fresh design, with usable navigation and accessible to any user. In this context it’s mainly the design/feeling/apperance we mean when we say web 2.0. Design-wise you could for example look at the following links:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/03/10/web-20-tutorials-round-up/
http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/web-2.0-design-style-guide.cfm
http://www.f6design.com/journal/2006/10/21/the-visual-design-of-web-20/

Good luck!

I posted this on the blog, but just in case people don't check, I did a quick pen tool logo for people to use (its a PDF but you can edit it in Illustrator)

http://www.linkartist.com.au/cmsmslogo.pdf

t

Hi,
I'm just wondering if anything happened with the competition, was/is there a winner?