To start you can see the current design at www.celebrium.biz/ihost/ Here is what we are looking for: Clean, relatively minimalistic design -- everything on the page should be there for a reason. High-contrast -- there's nothing worse than squinting to navigate a washed-out UI for something as important as a billing system. Attention to detail (which is hard to quantify, but all of the fonts should be just right, the colors should work well together, it should look like a consistent unit) Reasonable font sizes It should LOOK like a billing application. Lots of designers like to use whiz-bang chrome effects and reflective this and that, which is great... except for the fact that this is a financial application. Our target audience is looking for reliability and stability -- whether or not a bunch of 16-year olds think it's cool doesn't really make a difference. Having said the above, we want it to look very MODERN and PROFESSIONAL. Those are the two words I stress the most. For the technical side, we absolutely must have the following: An XHTML+CSS design, preferably tableless. It MUST be designed with heavy use of CSS in mind -- that is, we don't just want a table full of big images. Navigation must not use images for links -- all menus/links are dynamically generated by our code based on permissions/etc. Obviously we'll need one design for the login form, another design for the admin/client area. You should take into account that this is a billing application when creating a mockup. eg: Don't just use "dummy" placeholder text in the content area of the design... instead, design up a sample invoice list (or account register, or account list, or any of the other types of lists we use) so that we can use that as a basis for all of the other lists in iHost. There's nothing worse than an application that has a great header/footer design, but then looks like the application itself was just crammed carelessly into the middle. We want the whole thing to look cohesive. Along the lines of the previous point, you should include in your design a way to break up separate sections on the same page -- we currently do this with fieldsets, but obviously that's going to need to change... we need you to come up with a nice headers/separators for each section on the page. We would like to pick a winner by march 1st but reserve the right to close the contest early. If we like a design thats submitted we are also willing to negotiate the current $400 prize.
gosh ! .. I was afraid no one would reply on this thread. . been tracking it down for views and replies ratio .. I would happily do the design but the coding is where I am stuck .. would someone like to take $100 for coding while I do the design elements ( and take $300 ) ?
Can you provide an example of what you would like, along with a more defined explanation on what you would want to be coded.
I do not have a set idea on what we want. This is why i am asking for people to make a mock up of there ideas. From that i can see if someone has the talent and "IT" factor we are looking for. As for the coding we can do the actual coding of the design, but you still need to be aware of what an XHTML+CSS design is going to involve in the HTML coding part... otherwise someone will do things in the PSD that simply can't translate into XHTML+CSS without using large tables of images (which will make the UI slow for the user, and a soar to work with from a programming perspective). If we do the coding we would like to negotiate the prize with the winner, however if the winner really has a nice design we will more then likely still offer the same prize or more.