Comics / Spotlight

Comic Book Bin Web Site Design Competition

By Hervé St-Louis
January 3, 2010 - 22:54

How ugly do YOU think The Comic Book Bin is?

Are YOU a designer or someone with serious artistic sensibilities?

Do YOU think that you can do a better job than us with the looks of this site?

Would YOU like to be the designer responsible for a major comic book site redesign and have your ideas seen the world over?

Would YOU like to decide what the next look of The Comic Book bin is?

Well Now, YOU can do something about it. In January, The Comic Book Bin is running a competition to redesign our looks for 2010. We will accept entries and present them all in February to the public who will be asked to pick a winning entry. The winning entry will receive a cash prize.


Minimum of 3 Page Design including:

1. The Comic Book Bin’s Home Page
2. The Category Index Pages (The main section pages for  main sections on the site, like comics, comics reviews, action figures, movies, video games, comic strips and so on – but not including the blog index)
3. Article Pages

We require high quality jpeg files (you may put your transparent watermarks) that can be seen easily by visitors that will vote on them. We will also accept animated concepts in Flash, if you want to demonstrate how the site would be used.

Stuff you can’t change:

• You must use our existing logo – we will not accept designs with new logo suggestions. Just to be clear – WE ARE NOT CHANGING LOGO – ‘nuff said.
• There must be search tools within the interface of every page.
• There must be a menu on every page.
• We are not changing the software nor the technology that runs our site. Your concept has to be compatible with templates for a content management system. Let me repeat WE ARE NOT CHANGING THE ARCHITECTURE BEHIND THE WEB SITE – WE ARE ONLY CHANGING THE VISUAL LOOK. DO NOT PROPOSE US NEW TECHOLOGY SOLUTIONS. WE WANT DESIGNS – NOT TECHNOLOGY.
• Information, such as copyright notices, privacy, credits (name of author, creator credits for reviews, pricing information and related meta data).

Parts of the Site Not Included in Your Proposal:

• Printer-friendly article pages
• Mobile-friendly pages
• The blog’s pages
• The classifieds
• The newsletter registration pages
• The RSS feed

What We Want

• Creativity – you can change and improve anything that we did not specify you could not change.
• A site that loads fast – Your design has to be good enough so that the pages load quickly.
• A site that is easy to navigate with logical organization.
• A site that looks unique. We don’t want a clone. We want something our visitors will be happy to visit and something the guys at the Bin and you will be proud to show to friends. Go crazy.

Please submit all proposals to design@comicbookbin.com

The due date is Monday February 8, 2010.

We will post all proposals (that adhere to our rules and conditions) in a special section of the Bin where our visitors will be asked to vote for the best design. We will probably pick the design with the most votes.

Please include the following information with your proposal:

Name, full address, country of origin, telephone number, valid email address, age. Make sure you have a Paypal account (although no need to submit it now!)
If you are a minor, we will require the consent of your legal guardian in writing.

The Prize?

The winning entry will receive a cash amount of a maximum of $500 which will include of course the release of the copyrights of your design to The Comic Book Bin (so we can actually use the design, right). The Comic Book Bin will not claim any copyrights on non winning entries. Cash compensations may be awarded to other designs the staff at The Comic Book Bin like.


More Questions

1-You do not need to be a comic book reader, just someone with good taste.

2-You can work on this project as a team or individually.

3-Don’t send us “side” proposals for this design job. We want our visitors to vote for the design. Submit your project to them.

4-Can you increase the prize cash amount – No we can’t.

5-Can you propose a project that uses something like AJAX, Flash, PHP, Ruby on Rails? If it’s part of the design – maybe, but we are not changing our site to Flash, or PHP or any other technology. We are not interested in technology that is time consuming to manage. We are quite happy with our backend architecture. We don’t want to change what is not broken and is easy to use. This competition is about DESIGN, NOT TECHNOLOGY.

6-Can you propose new sections or features on the site – You may, but it may not be implemented. Again, focus on DESIGN not TECHNOLOGY. Focus on what is already on the site and how to improve access to our great contents – don’t focus on transforming The Comic Book Bin into something it is not.

7-Any colour preferences, format preferences, vertical or horizontal menus, ideas for the width of the pages, how many articles on the home page to be featured and so on? – It’s your call. Go crazy.

8-Please be prepared to hand us your original files, in case you win, so we can implement your design on our existing architecture. This is a design competition. We are not asking you to implement the template changes on the architecture for us in the future. Your design should come in files like Photoshop with all layers intact and properly named. Same thing for Illustrator and Flash files.  All states of objects, buttons, and other elements should be well named or included within the master file or as individual well named files with proper instructions if required. We are not looking to purchase any supplemental technology to make your design work with The Comic Book Bin’s architecture. Make sure that any rights for images and design elements that you did not cover can be secured easily by us and that usage is authorized by the copyrights holder.

9-Any winning bid that requires us to purchase additional services or items other than the design proposition will be rejected.

10-We reserve the right not submit proposals to our visitor for voting.

11-We reserve the non exclusive right to feature your proposal on the site before, during the competition and after.

12-You may propose several designs.

13-Please understand that the public will comment, criticize and maybe mock your proposals and that we do not control their opinions. But we'll try to make sure you can respond.

14-Please spread the news about this contest. There are millions of designers out there.

Source Files.

Here are copies of our logo. That’s all you should need! Please respect the integrity of our logo in your design. Don’t stretch it, change colours, change the spatial layout or size of items within the logo. We are not looking to “improve” our logo.

Download Logo in PNG 126 kb

Our motto is “Filling you in since 2002.”

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12