My brother Alex has just won the Slashdot redesign contest! Have a look at the official announcement and Alex’s blog entry.

The contest was announced a month ago, and has garnered wide interest in geekdom, not to mention a huge number of submissions. Before the contest closed a week ago, Rob ‘CmdrTaco’ Malda wrote of having been flooded with over two hundred entries, which he eventually winnowed down to three finalists: Peter Lada’s, Michael Johnson’s and Alex’s.

All three finalists look good enough that choosing one of them comes down to personal aesthetics (in this case, Rob’s.) However, I suspect what counted strongly in Alex’s favor, despite a somewhat late entry into the game, was his attention to detail in the design, combined with the sheer effort he put into actually finishing up all the various screens and sections, without forgetting the countless hours of cursing Internet Explorer till the cross-browser behavior was pixel perfect (BrowserCam was a huge help, here.)

The contestants were constrained to work within the existing HTML 4.0 page markup as far as possible, leaving the revamp to be achieved with pure CSS, and effectively preventing any major structural changes. As such, the new look & feel, soon to roll out, is mostly an evolutionary touch-up of the venerable tech news site, keeping the existing layout fairly intanct and certainly preserving the Slashdot identity, predominant green color and all.

I think (in my entirely unbiased opinion, of course) that the end result turned out rather fantastic, and will inject some much-needed zest back into the site. Until now, Slashdot has looked pretty much the same as it did way back in 1998, and by today’s standards, that just ain’t too easy on the eyes. With brash startups like Digg and Reddit now competing for the same eyeballs and advertising dollars, this facelift was long overdue, and I do hope the visual upgrade is a mere harbinger of further Slashdot improvements to come.

Alex is starting to accumulate a bit of a track record on design competitions, having previously won Wil Shipley’s blog redesign contest, whence he got an iPod in the mail. For the Slashdot contest, the prize is a MacBook Pro valued up to $4500. Yummy!

(Notice the trend there with prizes made out of Apple hardware? Worth their weight in gold.)

Update (2006-06-01): Over at the The Summit, I’ve posted a bit on surviving the Slashdot effect and gauging the blogosphere reactions to the Slashdot redesign.