And the Winner is Nicolas Le Gall

View the winning entry

Nicolas Le Gall is a 24 year old web development student and television station R&D trainee living and working in France. Nicolas chose to donate his $125 winnings to Abbé Pierre, which helps the homeless people of France. As Nicolas reminds us, though, “the purpose of entering the contest wasn’t winning, but challenge and good feedback which is most important in our work.”

The Internet is a wonderful platform; professionals: please keep that in mind. We have the opportunity to make it beautiful. But making it beautiful doesn’t mean making a lot. The more complex your website and your code, the more ugly and difficult to maintain it will be. Simplicity is beautiful.

or, in Nicolas’ words:

Internet est une plateforme magnifique, n’oubliez jamais ça. Nous avons l’opportunité de rendre le web encore plus beau. Mais faire du beau ne veut pas dire faire beaucoup. La simplicité c’est la beauté; plus votre code et votre site sera complexe, plus ils seront moches et difficiles à maintenir. Plus c’est simple, mieux c’est.

View All Submissions

View a listing of all 37 entries. Thanks to our judges for contributing such targeted and thorough comments. Thanks especially to Jennifer Curtiss for putting together the results and consolidating our judges’ comments.

About the Creepy Critters Contest

This time around, the judges agreed that microformats ought to be the tools of our trade. Brad Colbow worked on an awesome design that incorporated not only the hCard microformat, but also hCalendar. While there was plenty of room for growth, overall, in our entrants’ use of microfomats, we couldn’t be more pleased that so many entries successfully incorporated them into their HTML in a masterful manner.

A Quick Note on Every Entry

In judging, it was obvious that every single entrant put hard work and an acute attention to detail in their work. Here are just some of the highlights, although the items in the following list are certainly not comprehensive:

1. Entry turned in at record time!
2. Awesome image replacement method.
3. Nice hover effect on the links, completely functioning microformats, total semanticism.
4. Good document outline.
5. CSS3! Self-clearing elements!
6. Eric Meyer reset and good image replacement.
7. Nice pseudo-selector usage.
8. Favicon! Pseudo-selectors!
9. Working vevent microformat.
10. Valid code.
11. Definition list for pests.
12. Semantics for the hCalendar.
13. Defintion list positioning is nice and interesting.
14. Strict doctype!
15. Clean Markup!
16. Print CSS sheet.
17. Rickroll judges :)
18. Organized CSS and valid code.
19. Great organization!
20. Maintains readability on resize.
21. Perfection of the cascade concept.
22. Yay transparent pngs!
23. Awesome navigation hovers!
24. h1 for logo! WooT!
25. sIFR image replacement.
26. Well documented and organized HTML and Semantics.
27. Good hover effects.
28. Uses text-transform to uppercase.
29. Good with text resizing.
30. Nice organization.
31. Favicon! And functioning microformats!
32. CSS Sprites for hover state.
33. Favicon and good hovers.
34. Semantic code and functioning vCalendar.
35. CSS Sprites for hover.
36. Lists to organize pests and events, and good vCalendar.
37. Uses class to mark the active tab menu item.

We took a really long time to judge. But we come bearing good gifts for your patience: the near entirety of our judging notes. View the entry listing to see our thoughts and picks and pans on each and every entry. Mull. Comment. Discuss.

Judges names have been removed but we let you know when there’s a judge change. Two judges had to depart early due to life circumstances, so there were only 4 judges when an original 6 were planned. We divided up the entries among the judges, narrowed down each group, then reconvened to select your winner.

Caveat Emptor

We feel like Nicolas’ entry was great, that why we chose him as our winner – but judging markup and CSS is so subjective that it’s not fair to pick one above the rest. We think the real value is in the discussion you guys are about to have on the entries and our comments. So have fun, and be nice.

Oh, and Microformats

Just so you know; two classes are required for a working hCard: vcard and fn. fn means “formatted name” and if you don’t have it, it’s not an hCard or a valid microformat. View Nicolas’ entry for functioning microformats.

Post Scriptum

Things are going to be different next time around. Be in suspense: more to come.