Announcing the LewRockwell design content. Lew needs your help. After 13 years as THE place for libertarian news and views on the Internet, we’re upgrading the site to a WordPress platform. The old content is nearly imported, but the site’s design — the look and feel — is not decided. So Lew is looking for designs for the new site. Non-Designers, head over the the LRC Design Contest Facebook Page and log your suggestions and comments:

The Winning Design and Designer(s) Get: 

• The Glory and Publicity of being selected the winner, with the design used for Lewrockwell.com.
• A Link to their website in the article writing up the story of the site’s redesign.
• $500 from Lew.
• Some SWAG signed by Lew himself (he won’t tell me what, just that you’ll like it).
• The adulation (and potentially criticism) of millions of LRC readers, present and future.

Requirements: 

• Designs submitted must be original designs. No copyrighted material please.
• The preferred standard for final mock-ups is Photoshop (PSD files), although Adobe Illustrator is acceptable.
• LRC will transition the design into WordPress.
• LRC reserves the right to modify the winning design.
• By submitting a design, you share all rights with us.
• Ad support — Themes should accommodate ads — not necessarily 1 for 1 the way they are done now, but LRC is ad supported, so please keep that in mind.
• The Design should support the main landing page with 12 daily articles (preferably “above the fold”).
• Article Pages
• Blog Posts
• Calendar and Search
• See a concept at beta.lewrockwell.com that shows the wordPress widgets and layouts under consideration.
• Design Deadline is October 15th, 2012.

A winning design will account for the main page, blog pages, article pages, and author pages, while making sure that the design can adapt to changes in the future. Adding or removing menu items shouldn’t break half of the design — it should take minimal effort to make changes in WordPress without worrying about graphics breaking the design.

What to Submit / Technical Details: 

As much as possible, designs should be CSS3-friendly, meaning that the design will be implemented as much as possible using CSS code instead of images. This includes buttons, gradients, shadows, and non-standard fonts as examples. This shouldn’t impact the overall design, just your implementation inside Photoshop (the assumed design software). For example, if you have a simple gradient somewhere, it should be an actual Photoshop gradient effect where viewing its properties immediately reveals the colors involved (e.g., black at 0%, grey at 75%, white at 100%). Similarly, if using non-standard fonts and adding shadows to them, show actual editable text where its properties show the exact configuration of the text shadow (e.g., 3 pixels offset in whatever direction, with 4% spread). Everything needs to be dynamic.

It’s also important to neatly organize your Photoshop layers and label them accurately. Messy files take much longer to turn into HTML. “Layers” are all the components, e.g. every text field, button, shadow, etc is a layer. Do not dump them all into one big list of 300, with labels like “Item 1 copy .2”

Again, the preferred standard for final mockups is Photoshop (PSD files), although Adobe Illustrator is acceptable.

Designs should be submitted by October 15th, 2012, to [email protected]. Questions, comments, and ongoing dialog should take place on the Lewrockwell.com Site Redesign Facebook Page.

Thanks,

John Keller

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