Yjhall needed a new web page design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 12 designs submitted by 7 freelance designers.
Spottiness.com
We are interested in revealing what people really think. We believe that we all have a basic urge to express ourselves honestly and be heard, but that candor frequently puts us in trouble. "I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest."--said Ralph Ellison.
"The black spot" is a concept invented by Robert Louis Stevenson in his novel "Treasure Island" where pirates use it as a verdict of guilt. We created a mechanism for people to tip black spots, but evolved Stevenson's idea with two other types of spots: "gold spots" for appreciation and "love spots" for infatuation. All spots have in common that they are anonymous and have a target. We tip them by email or regular mail, and they stay in the Internet for a few years.
Everybody: the disgruntled student, the young lover, the grateful patient, the frustrated employee, the impressed customer, the married woman that thinks fondly of him, the political dissident, everyone that has something to say about something (human or not, abstract or concrete, real or fiction).
We want to redesign our front page to entice people to create "spots" (anonymous messages or opinions with a target). The home page should have calls to action for the creation of spots of each type (lovespots, goldspots, and blackspots). It should also have a search box to look for spots about a target and it should have a feed of recently created spots. The design must be compatible with the existing design of the site since we are just changing the front page.
Our top priority is to quickly convey the idea of what the site does and motivate users to create content.
1
One page: The homepage of Spottiness.com
-) With calls to action for the creation of each type of spot (3 types)
-) With a search box to find spots associated with a target
-) With a feed of recent spots (like Twitter.com or Foursquare.com)
-) Compatible with the existing design
The front page doesn't lead users to the creation of content (new spots). It's difficult to understand rapidly what the site does: "We tip anonymous messages that stay in the Internet". That's in a nutshell. "We publicize your anonymous opinion". That's also what we do.
Our ultimate goal is to be the place where you would go to find out the perception that exists of everything.