As you can see when you visit the Perl Dancer’s website, I suck at webdesign :) My skills are limited to a couple of Gimp tricks and the ability to find some Creative-Commons material on Flickr…

That’s why the design of our website is not as shiny, webbish and cool as it could be. At first, we were thinking at raising some money via donations for paying a profesionnal designer. But quickly some people volunteered here and there, and the idea to build a new design on goodwill did fit better the Free Software philosophy than paying someone to do it.

Today, more than 3 people volunteered to submit a proposal, so this gave me the idea to run a contest, let me explain what I have in mind:

The contest is to build a complete new visual identity for the Perl Dancer project. There are 3 categories in the contest: Website design, Logo, Web Banner for dancer-powered websites.

Here are the instructions a proposal must follow to be accepted:

• The artist is totally free regarding colors, visual elements, logo and CSS techniques.
• The following baseline should be visible: The easiest way to write web applications with Perl
• If any visual element is added to the design, it should recall the idea of one or more of the following concepts: Lightness, Easiness, Extensibility

Here is how to submit your proposal:

Update

After some feedback I’ve received, I’m now aware that asking someone to submit a full, finished project on the off chance that it might be used, is a bit unfair. It’s indeed a lots of work to polish the design completely. So I’m now changing the conditions for accepting a proposal: any design can be submited as a static HTML file, or as a screenshot.

This will be enough to let users vote. That way, the designer will work on all the details when they know they’ve won the contest.

First, install Dancer in order to be able to run your website clone locally:

$ curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - Dancer

Then create an account on GitHub if you don’t already have one.

Fork the perldancer-website project and clone it:

    $ git clone YOUR_FORK_URL
    $ cd perldancer-website

You can now work on your design by editing views and see your changes by running the dancer script:

$ ./perldancer.pl
>> Dancer server 527 listening on http://0.0.0.0:3000

Open a browser at http://localhost:3000 and see your design in action with the real website content. That’s how we dance ;)

When your design is ready for a proposal, make sure you’ve commited all your changes and push to your fork. Then ask for a pull request:

$ git push origin master
...

Note that there is no deadline yet, but we could choose one soon.
As soon as we have enough proposals, we’ll be able to open a vote for electing the winner.
All dancer users will be allowed to vote, this will probably happen on the users mailing list.