The Design Canopy

I was asked to judge the designs on appropriateness of elements, completeness of design, editorial judgment in design, effective use of color, effective use of typography, quality of style sheet coding and uniqueness/originality of design. (Source)

I spent several (plus a few and a couple!) hours viewing all the designs and narrowing them to my final results. Later this week (probably Saturday) I’ll discuss some of my favorites and why I liked them. Also, as Scott mentioned on the Sandbox Designs site, if you’re one of the participants and would like direct feedback on your design feel free to contact me.

For those that have already contacted me, I’ve received your email and will get back to you in the next few days. Thanks!

UPDATE: Below are some of my favorite entries from the competition in no particular order… Except for alphabetical.

Chocolate Vanilla
Chocolate Vanilla takes a tired, commonly-used layout and livens it up with a nice monotone brown color-scheme and good typography.

Essay
Essay has excellent typography, exhibited most strikingly in the sidebar elements. The uppercase sans-serif, uppercase serif and italicized text provide beautiful and subtle hierarchal contrast. The header image is unique and gives the site a relaxing and serious mood. The main navigation’s open borders connect the header area with the body of the site and add a touch of sophistication. This is a theme that encourages longer, thoughtful posts.

Moo Point
The layout of Moo Point is unique, but at the same time it feels instantly familiar. It guides the eye to the content of the latest post and engages the reader immediately. The minimal graphics and clean color scheme could be easily changed to a more custom look or left as-is to be made unique solely by the content.

Oriole
Contrasting colors provide the immediate distinction between a post and an aside in Oriole, as do different font sizes. The method of presenting the main navigation and search bar in the solid colored box provides uniqueness to the layout also.

Sakeena
Sakeena is a very sophisticated theme with a superbly beautiful sidebar and good use of the different CSS classes for the posts and asides. It’s a great example for integrating imagery into a design.

Scrappr
Scrappr has a unique design that fits its name nicely. It has a bit of a youthfulness to it with the yellow header and the clean typography and whitespace, and the elements that extend outside the margins make it seem a bit, well, scrappy.

Shades of Gray
Shades of Gray uses the ubiquitous header image intelligently, being as much a part of the design as the typography used for the titles and content it’s no afterthought. The secondary elements are not styled as an afterthought either: links are presented horizontally instead of the usual vertical orientation providing a fresh feel to the layout.

Well, there’s my summary, congratulations to the winners and a special thanks to Scott for all his hard work!