MidCOM Design Contest - Win an iPod Mini

HELSINKI, Feb 28th 2005 -- Nemein and the Midgard Community have announced a contest to redesign the MidCOM authoring interface (AIS). The winner of the contest will receive an iPod Mini portable music player.

The Authoring Interface System is the main editing and administrative interface seen by users of Midgard CMS. While several accessibility and usability improvements have been made, the current AIS interface looks quite boring and industrial:

To fix this situation we're looking for a new, standards-compliant design of the interface. The design should follow these points:

• Midgard is a heavy-duty, reliable Content Management System
• Midgard follows Open Standards (therefore the UI should be built on XHTML and CSS following WAI guidelines)
• Midgard's "fiery" color scheme
• GNOME's color palette and visual guidelines (where applicable)

The UI can be optimized to modern browsers like Firefox and IE but must remain usable also on browsers down to the simple text-based ones like Lynx.

The HTML and CSS rules of the existing MidCOM AIS can be a good starting point, but the design should not be limited to only tweaking them. Especially the HTML output can be modified as needed, given that the main elements remain present (although their visualization and grouping can be changed):

• Title bar: Midgard CMS, location and component infomation
• Directory's toolbar: create article, edit topic etc.
• Notice area: possible warnings, errors and status messages
• Navigation bar: navigation rendered either as a list or JavaScript tree menu
• Document's toolbar: edit article, delete article etc.
• Content area: editors and forms

Anyone can enter the contest with one or multiple proposals. Deadline for the entries is March 31st 2005, after which Midgard contributors will vote on the winning entry. The iPod Mini will be sent to the winner of the contest.

To submit an entry, mail a zip or tarball containing all required images, HTML, Javascript and CSS files to Henri Bergius (henri.bergius@iki.fi). The email should include real name and postal address.

The entries must be licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License. A bonus item in the contest is to submit a XHTML+CSS redesign of the Midgard website.