Wookieepedia:Visual Identity Contest

Wookieepedia no longer hosts this contest. This page is preserved as a historic record.

In honor of its second anniversary, Wookieepedia announces the Visual Identity Contest — a project that aims to create a fresh, unique and recognizable visual identity for the website.

If you want to try your web design skills, this is your chance!

What's in it for me?

If you're a Wookieepedian and want to improve the look of the website you visit on a daily basis, you now have an opportunity to do so! Even if you're not, you will receive public recognition and the Wookieepedians' gratitude for improving the usability and eye-candiness of the wiki.

The winning entry will become Wookieepedia's second official skin, along with the default Monobook — and maybe even replace it as the primary one.

Submissions from both amateur and professional web designers are welcome — there is no such thing as failure, and even if your skin doesn't make it to the top, there will surely be users who will be grateful for your skin and will want to use it as their user CSS.

Judgment

The exact method of judgment will depend on the number of skins submitted for the contest, but it will definitely involve the entire community of Wookieepedia — we do not want to alienate our users, and the consent of the majority of our users will be an absolute requirement after the skin is deemed as passing the technical restrictions.

Requirements

There is no limitation on how "Star Wars" the skin should be, since this is subjective. However, there are several technical points you should check before submitting a skin:

  • It should work well with resolutions at least in the 800*600 to 1600*1200 range.
  • It should be compatible with at least Internet Explorer 6.0-7.0, Opera 9.0, and Firefox 2.0. Ideally, you should strive for compatibility with Opera 8.5+, Firefox 1.0+, Konqueror and Safari, but if your OS of choice does not allow you to run some of these browsers, you may release the skin as is without testing it in the browser in question.
  • It should look roughly the same in all browsers you can test the skin in. Only use browser-specific features when they're needed to achieve uniform look and feel. For example, do not use the Mozilla-specific rounded corners (even though Monobook on Wookieepedia does this as of this writing).
  • It should not rely on JavaScript to function properly (except, possibly, in IE6).
  • It should not lose usability with images disabled - for example, text should be readable even with images disabled. However, it doesn't mean it isn't allowed to use graphics at all - you certainly can and are encouraged to use graphics, especially Star Wars-themed ones.
  • It should not be a fixed-width design, instead occupying the entire browser window width, like the default skin.
  • It should preserve the Wikia ads, either to the left or to the right of the content, and the current logo.

Licensing

Any submitted skins must be licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which Wookieepedia uses. Anything you post on Wookieepedia of which you are the author automatically falls under the GFDL, so if you link to your user CSS, this will be enough.

Alternatively, you can explicitly put your work into the public domain simply by stating your intent to do so.

This, however, means that you should not base your work on any existing skin that isn't GFDL-licensed. This includes most websites (however, MediaWiki skins, including Monobook, are GFDL, so you can derive from them), including all CSS Zen Garden skins. (They use the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) license, which is not GFDL-compatible. CC-BY (Attribution) is the only GFDL-compatible Creative Commons license. Neither the "share alike" nor the "non-commercial" provisions are compatible with the GFDL.)

How to reskin Wookieepedia

MediaWiki is skinned entirely via CSS - the HTML layout remains intact.

MediaWiki has a skin called "MySkin" that has no default CSS at all. If you want to retain Monobook as your primary skin while working on your own skin, you can still test pages without switching the skin in your settings, using the "useskin" parameters.

You can start by studying the HTML layout of MediaWiki (and the Wikia-specific alterations) and writing CSS code that styles the elements. Put the CSS code at your /myskin.css subpage during the development; to test a page with the MySkin skin, append the "useskin=myskin" to the page you want to test, for example, like this: 

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page?useskin=myskin
http://starwars.wikia.com/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=edit&useskin=myskin

You should reload your browser cache after every change made to your CSS file.

Studying the Monobook CSS file may also help.

Images

You may upload any images you need for your skin, but be sure to tag them with the {{vic-image}} template and link to your skin, using this syntax: 

{{vic-image|User:USERNAME/filename.css]]}}